PhD Dissertation Defense by TAN Pang Jin | Collaborative Freight Forwarding: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

Collaborative Freight Forwarding: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

ABOUT THE TALK

Freight forwarders act as intermediaries between shippers and carriers, purchasing capacity in advance and reselling it to shippers. By consolidating shipments, they profit from economies of scale but face the challenge that capacity must be procured months ahead while shipper demand remains uncertain. This often leads to over- or under-procurement, eroding profitability. Collaborative capacity sharing offers a solution to better align capacity with demand, but equitably allocating costs among partners remains complex. This dissertation employs game-theoretic approaches to design fair and stable cost-sharing mechanisms that incentivize cooperation. First, we formulate the Freight Forwarder Collaboration Problem (FFCP), an integer linear program that minimizes total shipping costs under collaboration. A two-step approach combining greedy heuristics and bounded optimization achieves optimal solutions while reducing computation time by up to 81%, enabling practical scalability.

Second, in the static setting, where all forwarders participate simultaneously, we propose the Locally Collaborative Games (LCG) and exploit its underlying network structure to speed up Shapley value computation. The proposed Fast Shapley algorithm reduces runtime by 82% compared to general methods, while enabling forwarders to achieve cost savings of up to 15%.

Third, in the dynamic setting, we propose the Dynamic Stable and Fair Allocation Problem (DSFAP) to address sequential participation and time-varying fairness. Solution approaches are designed to guarantee fair and stable allocations. A sampling-based approximation achieves less than 10% error using only 10% of coalition evaluations.

Finally, we propose the Platform Value Game (PVG) where the platform is modeled as an agent, creating a value function that differentiates between pre-existing and platform-facilitated collaboration. To ensure coalition stability, minimal platform subsidies are required (under 2% revenue loss) while enabling forwarders still achieving up to 18% cost saving.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

TAN Pang Jin is a PhD candidate with SCIS supervised by Assoc. Prof. CHENG Shih-Fen. His research interests are in collaborative logistics, platform economics, cooperative game theory and their applications to the freight forwarding industry. He is currently working as Instructor in SCIS. Previously he has had stints with DHL Group and PSA Corporation. He obtained his Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Engineering) from the National University of Singapore.