Improved Collaborative Transport Planning at Dutch Logistics Service Provider Fritom

We study the collaborative transport planning for two autonomous business units of Fritom, a Dutch logistics service provider. This difficult planning problem does not fit any existing type of vehicle routing problem proposed in the academic literature; therefore, we define a new problem class, the generalized pickup and delivery problem. We also propose and evaluate methods to structure and improve Fritom’s existing collaborative transport planning process. Using an extensive real-world data set from Fritom, our experiments show that our proposed methods significantly outperform Fritom’s collaborative planning approach in total travel distance. We formulate managerial recommendations for Fritom and describe the implementation process for these recommendations. Finally, we present several recommendations for future research.