Fleet composition and vehicle routing with heterogeneous customer prefernces

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Christian Bierwirth; Professor Dr. Thomas Kirschstein
• Subject Area: Operations Management and Computer Science for Business Administration
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 567015469

Stricter environmental requirements for road freight transport and the growing demand for environmentally friendly transport services effect vehicle fleets in road freight transport to gradually change to low- emission and, in the long term, climate-neutral drive technologies. These technologies possess different technological characteristics (like range, operational cost, emission rates) and, thus, application profiles. As with private motorized transport, fleet transition processes will take place over a long period of time. Unclear is, how this process will take place and whether there finally will be a dominating drivetrain technology. At the same time, industrial shippers' incentives increase for choosing environmentally friendly transport options because the carbon footprint of logistics services will be included in sustainability reporting as indirect emissions. Shippers can express their environmental preferences and influence the environmental impact of the transport service they order through their willingness to pay. If shippers with different environmental preferences meet a carrier with a mixed vehicle fleet, a structurally new vehicle routing problem arises. Since the routes of vehicles are individually accounted on the basis of existing regulations, it plays a role whether a shipper is served by a conventional or a low-emission transport vehicle. Environmentally sensitive shippers will expect their shipments to be transported by climate-friendly vehicles, which the carrier must certify by means of a CO2 emission declaration. Cost-sensitive shippers, on the other hand, continue to demand low transport rates and have to accept higher CO2 emission declarations in return. The situation outlined is to be researched in this project using a labeling approach, among others. Shippers can express their environmental preference by specifying a climate efficiency class that must be achieved by the carrier's logistics performance. The aim of the project is the conception and prototypical implementation of a platform for the design and operation planning of a heterogeneous vehicle fleet, taking into account multi-criteria customer preferences. To map customer preferences and the interaction between the target dimensions, emission and cost allocation methods based on multi- criteria combinatorial auction mechanisms are developed. With the planning platform, freight carriers can effectively skim off the shipper's willingness to pay in order to provide funds for a market-compliant conversion of their vehicle fleets.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants