Iterative Auction Mechanism Design For Carriers’ Truckload Lines Collaboration Problem

Modern transportation enterprises are facing fierce market competition,especially in the case of high empty transportation cost.Third-party Logistics Platform can provide information exchange platform for transport enterprises,which can reduce the information asymmetry obstacles between enterprises.Transportation companies can improve operation efficiency and service level by implementing collaborative transportation strategy.In the process of truckload cooperation,each transporter can bid for the bundle lines as buyer or auction lines as seller.Through the lines combinatorial auction,transporter can realize the continuous truckload shipping and reduce the noload transportation cost.We proposes a combinatorial auction mechanism to solve high no-load transportation cost problem.The Lane Covering Problem can be used to solve route optimization problem.Specifically,transporters involved in the collaboration have truck resource limitation.Truck resource investments need high cost while the utilization rate of trucks is low.Third-party logistics platforms are usually commercial organizations that charge commissions as transaction cost when providing platform services.Therefore,we consider the impact of truck resource limitation and 3PL commissions on cooperation benefits separately in this paper.We provide some management suggestions for the practical application of the mechanism.Truck limitation auction mechanism satisfies incentive compatibility,individual rationality,budget balance,and convergence within finite iterations.Extensive experiments show that increasing truck resources will improve the effectiveness of mechanism and participant cooperation benefits,while increasing truck resources requires amount of invested cost.Truck limitation auction mechanism in this paper enables transporters to obtain more cooperation benefits by participating in the cooperation when they have fewer truck resources.This can reduce the transporter’s dependence on truck resources and choose cooperative transportation strategy.The auction mechanism of 3PL charging commission satisfies incentive compatibility,individual rationality and weak budget balance.Besides,experiments show that the mechanism is highly efficient and substantially increase the participant cooperation benefits.At the same time,in 3PL charging commission case,the optimal social welfare mechanism is superior to the optimal 3PL profit mechanism in terms of effectiveness,but the difference is small.Therefore,the mechanism designed in this paper has compatibility in terms of social welfare optimization and 3PL profit optimization.In addition,large scale transport network,low operating line density and high transportation cost heterogeneity can enhance the performance of combinatorial auction mechanism.The combinatorial auction mechanism designed in this paper is not computationally complex,and each carrier can complete the bundles exchange within a reasonable calculation time so that carriers achieve truckload shipping.We separately study the impact of truck resources and 3PL commission on the mechanism performance.In the future,we can consider the impact of these two factors on the auction mechanism simultaneously.