Multi-agent system with iterative auction mechanism for master bay plan problem in marine logistics

The support of containerization to trade development demands an efficient solution method for the container loading problem in order to reduce shipment and handling time. Hence, the stowage planning of containers is critical to provide speedy delivery of resources from the area of supply to the area of demand. Moreover, information on container terminal activities, structure of ship, and characteristics of containers is distributed among stowage planners. This information imposes constraints, and so the master bay plan problem (MBPP) becomes NP-hard. Therefore, a multi-agent systems (MAS) methodology is designed to effectively communicate the information and solve the MBPP sustainably. In the designed MAS methodology, an information exchange system (IES) is created for stowage planners to bid for ship slots in each experimental iterative combinatorial auction (ICA) market. The winner in the ICA experiments is provided with the ship slots, and the entire bay plan is prepared. Further, the ship-turnaround time is validated using the data obtained from the benchmark problem

Sustainable decision model for liner shipping industry

Maritime transport facilitates international trade activities and contributes to world׳s economic growth and prosperity. Still maritime transport faces several operations challenges such as non-storability of shipping space, matching supply with dynamic shipping demand, and non-availability of fair allocation mechanism in the age of information exchange systems due to ban of anticompetitive liner conference amongst others. This paper develops a sustainable decision model for allocating ship capacity to satisfy shipping demand and to generate a route plan. The model is referred as sustainable because it determines flexible freight rates and coordinates market players with social interest. The paper uses multi-agent system modeling and an iterative combinatorial auction mechanism with Vickrey–Clarke–Groves payments to deploy ships at economically efficient prices in the age of information exchange systems. To tackle the computational complexity of multi-agent system model with auction mechanism, this paper proposes an enumerative search algorithm. Our proposed model and method can aid liner shipping industry managers to better realize their desired economical and social sustainable decisions targets by sharing information, costs, and benefits