Abstract:

Carrier collaboration to exchange transportation requests between carriers is an important way to exploit synergies and increase the efficiency of the transportation industry. Literature frequently recommends auction mechanisms for the exchange of requests.

The exchange of transportation requests has several peculiar properties

•     Participants act simultaneously as buyers and sellers in the same market.
•     Valuations of requests are highly interdependent.
•     Synergies between requests are limited by capacity constraints.
•     Realistic problems involve a large number of requests and require heuristic solution methods.

Existing approaches assume that carriers submit request to an auctioneer, who combines these requests into bundles, which are then allocated in a combinatorial auction. The efficiency of this approach depends heavily on the bundles created by the auctioneer, which requires sensitive cost information from carriers.

In the present paper, we analyze an alternative mechanism, in which bundle generation is performed endogenously. The mechanism is based on an existing auction mechanism for complementary goods, which we adjust to consider the specific characteristics of the request exchange problem. We develop different variants of the modified algorithm and compare them in a computational study.