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

ABOUT THE TALK

Freight forwarders serve as critical intermediaries between shippers and carriers. Due to the challenge of managing uncertain supply and demand, collaboration among forwarders is highly beneficial. This dissertation applies cooperative game theory to address the problem of fair payoff allocation in such collaborative efforts. The first contribution of this dissertation is the formulation of an optimization problem that models how forwarders can reduce overall costs through capacity sharing. Building on this base model, the dissertation extends the problem in two directions: static and dynamic settings. In the static setting, we introduce a new class of cooperative games characterized by strong network structures and develop an efficient algorithm to compute their Shapley values.  This framework is then applied to the case of collaborating forwarders, providing methods to fairly allocate the shared costs among the participants. In the dynamic setting, we define the dynamic stable and fair allocation problem with specific properties and develop an approximation scheme for computing fair payoffs. Finally, the model is applied to the scenario of sequentially arriving forwarders, offering insights into how collaboration can be sustained and optimized over time.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tan Pang Jin is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the SMU School of Computing and Information Systems, supervised by Assoc. Prof. Cheng Shih-Fen. His research focuses on designing incentive mechanisms and developing computationally efficient algorithms in collaborative logistics.