Bidding and Bid Analysis Problems in Combinatorial Auctions for the Procurement of Transportation Service Contracts

摘要

During the past several years, large shippers have changed the way they contract for trucking services — moving from lane by lane negotiation to using software based loosely on combinatorial auctions. Combinatorial auctions are those in which an auctioneer (shipper) places multiple items out to bid simultaneously and in which the bidders (trucking companies) may present several bids for bundles of items simultaneously. The bid valuation and construction problem for carriers facing combinatorial auctions for the procurement of freight transportation contracts is very difficult and involves the computation of a number of NP-hard sub problems. The shipper's winner determination problem is also well known to be NP-hard. Our research is concerned with the development of computationally tractable approximation methods for both the bid analysis and winner determination problems facing trucking companies and shippers.