Request evaluation strategies for carriers in auction-based collaborations

Abstract

In the highly competitive shipping and transportation industry, companies need to achieve a maximum level of efficiency in order to stay in business. To reach this goal they 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. A critical part here is the formation of the request candidate set, which is the bundle of requests that should be offered to other carriers. Therefore, we develop and evaluate different request evaluation strategies for carriers participating in auction-based collaborations. For our investigations, we use a framework that is based on an exchange mechanism presented in the literature. The goal is to maximize the total network profit while enabling the carriers to reveal as little as possible of their private information. We did several adaptions to the existing framework to improve the performance and to make it applicable to larger test cases. For instance, the exact and thus costly tour building method is replaced by a heuristic approach. We achieve comparable results while the runtime is reduced by several orders of magnitude. Thus, we are able to handle problems with an increased number of transportation requests. Different strategies for the evaluation of pickup and delivery requests are assessed based on their effect on the total profit of the collaborative carrier network.