Winner Determination in Combinatorial Reverse Auctions

Abstract

Since commercially efficient, combinatorial auctions are getting more interest than traditional auctions. However, winner determination problem is still one of the main challenges of combinatorial auctions. In this paper, we propose a new method based on genetic algorithms to address two important issues in the context of combinatorial reverse auctions: determining the winner(s) in a reasonable processing time and reducing the procurement cost. Indeed, not much work has been done using genetic algorithms to determine the winner(s) specifically for combinatorial reverse auctions. To evaluate the performance of our method, we conducted several experiments comparing our proposed method with another method related to determining winner(s) in combinatorial reverse auctions. The experiment results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of processing time and procurement cost.