Coalitions in Collaborative Forest Transportation Across Multiple Areas

We study a problem of collaboration in the transportation of forest biomass in Sweden. The country is divided in different areas. While some companies operate in a single area, other companies operate in two or more areas. With different coalitions forming in different areas, the same company may belong to two or more coalitions. In this chapter, we develop three approaches for this problem, based on integer programming models. We compare the solution to these approaches using real-world data. Our results reveal that, although the area division restricts supply points to fulfil only demand points within their corresponding area, it renders flexibility when there is a bound limiting the cardinality of the coalitions.