Multi-period cooperative vehicle routing games

In the paper we treat the problem of minimizing and sharing joint transportation cost in multi-agent vehicle routing problem (VRP) on large-scale networks. A new approach for calculation subadditive characteristic function in multi-period TU-cooperative vehicle routing game (CVRG) has been developed. The main result of this paper is the method of constructing the characteristic function of cooperative routing game of freight carriers, which guarantees its subadditive property. A new algorithm is proposed for solving this problem, which is called direct coalition induction algorithm (DCIA). Cost sharing method proposed in the paper allows to obtain sharing distribution procedure which provides strong dynamic stability of cooperative agreement based on the concept of Sub-Core and time consistency of any cost allocation from Sub-Core in multi-period CVRG.