Collaborative Vehicle Routing when Agents have Mixed Information Sharing Attitudes

The transportation market requires collaboration to improve efficiency and reduce emissions. Individual carriers, however, might be hesitant to share their private information on a transportation platform. Although a few articles have investigated the value of information sharing, they assume identical behaviour of all carriers. In practice, nonetheless, some carriers are open to share more information than others. We consider such a hybrid information sharing setting and investigate the value of information sharing dependent on what other carriers are willing to share. We propose a Multi-Agent System in which carriers and customers interact and vary carriers’ willingness to share information about vehicle locations and marginal costs. The results show that sharing full route plans is always beneficial for individual carriers, independent of what position information other carriers share. However, to increase the total profit in scenarios with limited interaction, at least 50% of the carriers need to share full plans instead of only current positions. Furthermore, about 60% of the carriers need to be stimulated to share full cost information for solutions with maximal service level, although it might be unprofitable for themselves.