A new metric for gain sharing assessment in collaborative distribution: the sustainability and flexibility rate

Abstract

The benefits of horizontal collaboration depend heavily on the flexibility that each partner allows in his delivery conditions through the creation of better and more efficient distribution plans. On the other hand, the sharing of savings is one of the main factors that can block the success of collaboration and produce, consequently, conflicts between partners. This paper argues that to achieve equitability, the sharing of collaborative savings must take into consideration the partners’ participation in sustainability and flexibility. Involving each partner's sustainability and flexibility when sharing the gains from horizontal collaboration is an effective way to persuade companies to relax their plans. First, the importance of including these two factors on the performance of horizontal collaboration is highlighted. The introduced approach consists in using the decomposition method to determine a sustainability and flexibility rate for each partner. Then, an allocation approach based on cooperative game theory (namely τ-value), is developed. It combines each partner's impact on sustainability and his level of flexibility in terms of delivery time. The obtained results show that the suggested approach can adjust the results of the traditional approach by preventing the partners from benefiting from each other.

KEYWORDS:

• Horizontal collaboration
• sustainability
• flexibility
• theory of cooperative games
• allocation problem

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings study are openly available in (Mrabti et al., 2020) at https://doi.org/10.1080/01605682.2020.1772022

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nassim Mrabti

Nassim Mrabti earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Picardie Jules Verne and an industrial engineering degree in 2017 from the Higher National Engineering School of Tunis. His research work is about the collaborative distribution network design problem and the sharing cost problem, considering sustainability indicators.

Nadia Hamani

Nadia Hamani is an Associate Professor at the University of Picardie Jules Verne and Head of a Master and Bachelor Program in Logistics. She is a member of the laboratory of Innovative Technology. She obtained a PhD in Industrial Engineering in 2005 at Ecole Centrale de Lille. She is co-chair of international conferences or special sessions and she authored or co-authored more than 90 scientific papers. She is involved in several research networks, projects and associations. Her research interests include sustainable supply chain and transportation, performance improvement of production and logistics systems.

Laurent Delahoche

Laurent Delahoche is an Associate Professor and having completed his habilitation in Computer Science at the University of Picardie Jules Verne. He is responsible for the Intelligent Systems team at the Innovative Technologies Laboratory. His research focuses on the issues of intelligent transportation and housing. He is author or co-author of more than 100 publications (journals articles, communications and book chapters).