CP-IP Techniques for the Bid Evaluation in Combinatorial Auctions

Abstract. Combinatorial auctions are an important e-commerce appli-cation where bidders can bid on combinations of items. The problem of selecting the best bids that cover all items, i.e., the Winner Determina-tion Problem (WDP), is NP-hard. In this paper we consider the time constrained variant of this problem, that is the Bid Evaluation Problem (BEP) where temporal windows and precedence constraints are associ-ated to each task in the bid. We propose different algorithms based on CP, IP and a hybrid approach based on both of them. We show that even the simplest pure CP based approach outperforms the only existing approach. We selected a set of algorithms which do not dominate each other. We identified a set of instance-dependent structural features that enable to select the best class of algorithms to apply. This is the first step toward an automatic algorithm selection in algorithm portfolios.