Winner Determination in Combinatorial Double Auctions Based on Differential Evolution Algorithms

Abstract

Although combinatorial double auctions make buyers and sellers trade goods more conveniently, the winner determination problem (WDP) in combinatorial double auctions poses a challenge due to computation complexity. Differential evolution (DE) is a competitive evolutionary algorithm widely adopted to deal with complex optimization problems. In this paper, a combinatorial double auction problem with transaction costs, supply constraints and non-negative surplus constraints is considered. The WDP of combinatorial double auction problem is formulated as an integer programming problem. To deal with computational complexity of the WDP for combinatorial double auctions, we propose an algorithm for finding solutions based on two variants of discrete DE approach. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is also demonstrated by several numerical examples.