Title: Cost allocation in a container shipping alliance considering economies of scale: a CKYH alliance case study

Authors: Shiyuan Zheng; Rudy R. Negenborn; Xiaolin Zhu

Addresses: School of Transportation, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China ' Department of Maritime and Transport Technology, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands ' Department of Mathematics, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China

Abstract: This paper proposes and investigates three schemes for cost allocation in a container shipping alliance considering the economies of scale. In order to deal with the complicated interactions between carriers and the impact of the economies of scale on shipping cost, a duality-based, an inverse optimisation-based and a Shapley value-based scheme are discussed and compared to the conventional demand-based and turnover-based schemes. The theoretical models are applied in a case study involving the Asia-Europe container shipping lines of the CKYH alliance. The application results and the sensitivity analysis illustrate the practicability of our schemes.

Keywords: cost allocation; container shipping alliance; economies of scale; multicommodity flow game; inverse optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTL.2017.084827

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2017 Vol.9 No.4, pp.449 - 474

Received: 10 Jun 2015
Accepted: 20 Nov 2015
Published online: 30 Jun 2017 *

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