Speaker: Prof. Dr. Frederik Schulte (TU Delft)

Date: 16.10.2019
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Room: FaKo Raum (U3-140)

Title: Platform Operations Research: Foundations and the Cases of Coup Scooter Sharing and Quicargo Collaborative Trucking

Abstract: Over the last decade, platforms have emerged in numerous industries and often transformed them, which poses new challenges for operations research. Platform providers mostly do not have immediate control over the physical resources to move people or goods. They often operate in a multi-sided market setting where it is crucial to design clear incentives to motivate a third-party to engage in an adhoc kind of collaboration. As a consequence, collaboration incentives become an integral part of decision support models for platform providers, and they need to be developed on an operational planning level to be applied in a dynamic way. Naturally, this involves a trade-off between the interests of platform provider, customers, and various transportation service providers. In this work, we investigate the real-word case of Coup scooter sharing and propose a dynamic pricing approach that engages users in fleet management operations such as charging and repositioning of vehicles. First results indicate that this approach effectively increases vehicle utilization and revenues. As a second real-world case, we look at the platform provider, Quicargo, who operates as an intermediary between shippers and carriers in a less-than-truckload (LTL) business. We introduce a planning model that minimizes the price this platform pays to its carriers and enforces collaboration incentives for carriers. We explore possible policies to be implemented by the platform and find that their business even remains profitable when the platform guarantees increased profit margins to their carriers as incentives.