As the result of the more and more ambitious production and marketing strategies,such as Just-In-Time and increasing customization of products, the current vertical logistics collaboration approaches based on single supply chain seems insufficient to achieve further improvements in transportation efficiency. The horizontal logistics collaboration (HLC), which has been proved an effective approach to efficiency improvement, has attracted both academics and practitioners. One of the main barriers to the implementation of HLCs is the lack of feasible collaboration mechanism, in particular the gain sharing mechanism. We identify two organizational forms of HLCs: the centralized and decentralized ones. For centralized HLCs, we propose a collaboration model that is a collaboration conducting process integrating decision-aiding tools to guide the implementation of the collaboration. We also develop a generally applicable game-theoretic sharing mechanism for different categories of centralized HLCs modeled as super-additive and non-super-additive cooperative games. This sharing mechanism takes into account the collaborators' contribution, the coalition stability, and the bargaining power to propose a credible sharing scheme for collaborators. The approach is illustrated by numerical example taken from logistics cases. For the implementation of the decentralized HLCs, we propose an open collaborative logistics framework, and design the system protocols as the collaboration mechanism that specifies the combinatorial-auction-based request allocation and payment determination to foster the collaborations.
