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Combinatorial Auctions in Freight Logistics

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Computational Logistics (ICCL 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6971))

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Abstract

Freight business is a huge market with strong competition. In many companies, planning and routing software has been introduced, and optimization potentials have been widely exploited. To further improve efficiency, especially the small and medium sized carriers have to cooperate beyond enterprise boundaries. A promising approach to exchange transportation requests between freight carriers is provided by combinatorial auctions and exchanges. They allow bundles of items to be traded, thereby allowing participants to express complex synergies.

In this paper we discuss various goals for a combinatorial request exchange in freight logistics and provide the reasoning for our design decisions. All goals aim to improve usefulness in a practical environment of less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers. We provide experimental results for both generated and real-life data that show significant savings and are often close to a heuristic solution for the global optimization problem. We study how bundling and restricting the number of submitted bids affect the solution quality.

Part of this work was funded by Stiftung Rheinland-Pfalz für Innovation research grant 961 - 386261/864.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer ITWM, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Heiner Ackermann, Hendrik Ewe & Karl-Heinz Küfer

  2. Chair of Logistics, University Bremen, Germany

    Herbert Kopfer

Authors
  1. Heiner Ackermann
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  2. Hendrik Ewe
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  3. Herbert Kopfer
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  4. Karl-Heinz Küfer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Maritime Logistics, University of Technology, Schwarzenbergstraße 95 (D), 21073, Hamburg, Germany

    Jürgen W. Böse  & Carlos Jahn  & 

  2. School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dongchuan Road 800, 200240, Shanghai, China

    Hao Hu  & Xiaoning Shi  & 

  3. Institute of Information Systems, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, 20146, Hamburg, Germany

    Robert Stahlbock  & Stefan Voß  & 

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ackermann, H., Ewe, H., Kopfer, H., Küfer, KH. (2011). Combinatorial Auctions in Freight Logistics. In: Böse, J.W., Hu, H., Jahn, C., Shi, X., Stahlbock, R., Voß, S. (eds) Computational Logistics. ICCL 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6971. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24264-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24264-9_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24263-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24264-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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