Iterative Combinatorial Auction for Carrier Collaboration in Logistic Services

In collaborative logistics, multiple carriers form a network to share their transportation capacities. Collaboration among carriers results in improved resource utilization and, therefore, reduced costs. In this thesis, we propose an auction-based model for carrier collaboration in transportation services. The model achieves carrier collaboration through facilitating the negotiation among carriers over a group of shipping orders required by one or a group of shippers. The negotiation is conducted through a combinatorial iterative auction mechanism with the objective of minimizing the carriers’ overall costs. We first present a centralized carrier collaboration problem model in which a central entity has all required information to compute an optimal solution. We then consider a more realistic game theoretic setting where auction-based mechanism is applied to deal with self-interests of carriers. Compared with one-shot auctions, the proposed iterative bidding framework has the properties of reducing carriers’ information revelation and accommodating dynamic changes during the bidding process. Experimental results show that the procurement cost performance and the quality of solutions computed using the proposed iterative auction model is close to that of the optimal solutions

Agent-Based System Design for Service Process Scheduling: Challenges, Approaches and Opportunities

Compared with traditional manufacturing scheduling, service process scheduling poses additional challenges attributable to the significant customer involvement in service processes. In services, there are typically no inventoried products, which make the service provider's capacity more sensitive to dynamic changes. Service process scheduling objectives are also more complicated due to the consideration of customer preferences, customer waiting costs and human resource costs. After describing the Unified Services Theory and analysing its scheduling implications, this paper reviews the research literature on service process scheduling system design with a particular emphasis on agent-based approaches. Major issues in agent-based service process scheduling systems design are discussed and research opportunities are identified. The survey of the literature reveals that despite of many domain-specific designs in agent-based service process scheduling, there is a lack of general problem formulations, classifications, solution frameworks, and test beds. Constructing these general models for service process scheduling system design will facilitate the collaboration of researchers in this area and guide the effective development of integrated service process scheduling systems