An approach to solve winner determination in combinatorial reverse auctions using genetic algorithms

Abstract

Nowadays, winner determination problem is one of the main challenges in the domain of real-time applications such as combinatorial reverse auctions. To determine the winner(s) in combinatorial reverse auctions, in our previous work, we have proposed a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based method and have demonstrated its superiority in terms of processing time and procurement cost. One of the main drawbacks of traditional GA-based solutions is their inconsistency in different runs. In this paper, we perform a statistical-based experiment that reveals that our proposed method is not affected by the inconsistency issue. In addition, we show two other features of our GA-based method: (1) the quality of the solution improves over generations, and (2) the any-time behavior.