  Freight forwarding plays a crucial role in facilitating global trade and
logistics. However, as the freight forwarding market is extremely fragmented,
freight forwarders often face the issue of not being able to fill the available
shipping capacity. This recurrent issue motivates the creation of various
freight forwarding networks that aim at exchanging capacities and demands so
that the resource utilization of individual freight forwarders can be
maximized. In this paper, we focus on how to design such a collaborative
network based on collaborative game theory, with the Shapley value representing
a fair scheme for profit sharing. Noting that the exact computation of Shapley
values is intractable for large-scale real-world scenarios, we incorporate the
observation that collaboration among two forwarders is only possible if their
service routes and demands overlap. This leads to a new class of collaborative
games called the Locally Collaborative Games (LCGs), where agents can only
collaborate with their neighbors. We propose an efficient approach to compute
Shapley values for LCGs, and numerically demonstrate that our approach
significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for a wide variety of
network structures.
