Abstract
In horizontal collaborations, carriers form coalitions in order to perform parts of their logistics operations jointly. By exchanging transportation requests among each other, they can operate more efficiently and in a more sustainable way. This exchange of requests can be organized through combinatorial auctions, where collaborators submit requests for exchange to a common pool. The requests in the pool are grouped into bundles, and these are offered to participating carriers. From a practical point of view, offering all possible bundles is not manageable, since the number of bundles grows exponentially with the number of traded requests. We show how the complete set of bundles can be efficiently reduced to a subset of attractive ones. For this we define the Bundle Generation Problem (BuGP). The aim is to provide a reduced set of offered bundles that maximizes the total coalition profit, while a feasible assignment of bundles to carriers is guaranteed. The objective function, however, could only be evaluated whether carriers reveal sensitive information, which would be unrealistic. Thus, we develop a proxy for the objective function for assessing the attractiveness of bundles under incomplete information. This is used in a genetic algorithms-based framework that aims at producing attractive and feasible bundles, such that all requirements of the BuGP are met. We achieve very good solution quality, while reducing the computational time for the auction procedure significantly. This is an important step towards running combinatorial auctions of real-world size, which were previously intractable due to their computational complexity. The strengths but also the limitations of the proposed approach are discussed.
Highlights
In the highly competitive transportation industry, carriers need to aim for a maximum level of efficiency in order to stay in business
We investigated the bundling problem in combinatorial transportation auctions
We defined and modeled the Bundle Generation Problem (BuGP), in which the aim is to provide the set of offered bundles that maximizes the total marginal profit
Summary
In the highly competitive transportation industry, carriers need to aim for a maximum level of efficiency in order to stay in business. To approach the goal of maximized efficiency, carriers can, for instance, participate in collaborative networks and trade their transportation requests among each other. This is commonly done by using auction-based exchange systems. They build the full bundle set (i.e., the power set of the requests), but in order to reduce the complexity, they assume that carriers are not allowed to submit more than one request to the pool In this sense, the bundling problem is at least one of the less understood parts of the auction phases listed above.
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