Assessment of collaboration in city logistics: From the aspects of profit and CO₂ emissions

With the acceleration of urbanization, city logistics has developed so fast because of the growing demand for freight transportation. However, the negative effects caused by city logistics also stand out. Collaboration is an effective way to improve these situations, especially emphasizing on cost reduction of transportation and beneficial impact of the environment. In this paper, we study the actual influence of collaboration between two different carriers under no information shared and information shared situations respectively. Taking into account the transportation cost, the particular revenue of each lane and the CO2 emissions, this paper analyzes the collaboration performance under different mechanisms. Furthermore, a computational study is carried out. The specific results show that collaboration in city logistics can indeed improve the profit and achieve the carbon emissions abatement at the same time. However, the actual effects are different under different scenarios.