Truckload Transportation Service Procurement Via Combinatorial Auction

In recent years,with the acceleration of economic and trade globalization,the flow of goods and materials increases rapidly,the logistics industry has developed fastly,and the transport demand increases.However,the enterprise's transport capacity can not fully meet its own transport demands,so the outsourcing of logistics activities has become a more and more common choice.In practice,companies generally outsource transportation services to logistics suppliers through auctions,a process known as transportation service procurement.The procurement of transport services usually involves two roles: one is the enterprise with transport needs,usually called shipper;The second is the provider of transport services,often called the carrier.In the selection of logistics transport service providers,the traditional method is to organize a single-item auction.In practice,it is found that there is a strong synergy between different lanes,so scholars propose that combinatorial auction is the most appropriate auction mechanism.Combinatorial auctions allow carriers to bundle together a set of different combinations of lanes and submit a bid that takes full account of the synergies between the lanes,not only reducing the carrier's transport costs but also the shipper's procurement costs.In practice,the general transportation service procurement process is the following: the shipper first estimates the shipping demand on each origin-destination pair in the coming period.Then it transforms this information into a list of lanes and passes it to every carrier that is invited to the auction.Each carrier quotes prices on lanes,and the shipper finally evaluates the bids and selects the winners of each lane.Based on the context,this thesis studies the participants and their decisions in different stages of transportation service procurement,the specific research contents of this thesis are as follows:Firstly,to determine the lanes self-operation or outsourcing strategy in the shipper's transport network and consider the time window nature of the lanes,this dissertation studies the shipper lane selection problem with the time window.For the self-operation lanes,the shipper needs to decide the vehicle route of its vehicle.Other lanes are outsourced to carriers.The problem is constructed as a mixed-integer linear programming model,then a two-stage algorithm is designed to solve the problem.The influence of different algorithm performance and parameter changes on the shipper lane selection decision is analyzed through numerical experiments.The numerical results show that the shipper generally chooses the combination of self-operation and outsourcing transport mode.The proportion of self-operation and outsourcing varies with the change of carriers' service price and the fixed-cost of auction.In the case of economic cost only,the shipper tends to outsource a greater proportion of its transportation network after controlling a small portion of lanes when the carriers' service price is reduced.Secondly,discusses the bidding strategy of the carrier under the single-round combinatorial auction mechanism.Based on the existing transport network,the carrier integrates the auctioned lanes with the existing service lanes to further improve the transport efficiency,reduce the empty lanes and increase its profit,and then replans the vehicle routes.To win the bid,the carrier needs to consider the bidding behavior of other bidders when making a submit bid.Based on this consideration,the bundle of lanes and bid price are decision variables.The problem is modeled as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model.After the model is linearized,a two-stage algorithm is designed to solve the linearized model according to the characteristics of the problem.Numerical experiments are carrier out to identify the performance of different algorithms and the sensitivity of models to parameter changes.The results of numerical experiments show that the carrier can further reduce the empty lanes and gain more profit by bidding for the auction lanes based on the existing transport network.However,appropriately extending the length of the transport route in the transport network can increase the carrier's probability of obtaining the target and further reduce the transportation cost to obtain higher profits.Thirdly,to determine the winning carrier and allocate the auction lanes,this dissertation considers the shipper's preference for the carrier based on the single-round combinatorial auction mechanism and studies the problem of determining the winning carriers.The problem is constructed as a mixed-integer linear programming model,and binary cut constraints are introduced to express the shipper's preference to obtain the multiple solutions of the model.The validity of the model and the solution method is verified by numerical experiments.The results of numerical experiments show that with the expansion of the auction scale,the more carriers participating in the bidding,the more choices the shipper has for carriers,and the cost paid by the shipper will also be reduced.Fourthly,the problem of transportation service procurement under the multi-round combinatorial auction is studied as a comparative study.Due to the nature of the multi-round combinatorial auction,the problem includes both bidding selection and bidding allocation.Therefore,this dissertation considers both the shipper and carriers' decisions,establishes a bilevel programming model that minimizes the shipper's cost at the upper level and maximizes carriers' profit at the lower level,then designs a plant growth simulation algorithm to solve the problem.The results of numerical experiments show that,compared with a single-round combinatorial auction,the multi-round combinatorial auction can further reduce the procurement cost of the shipper and improve the transport efficiency of carriers.Finally,a case study is conducted based on the data of SF Express to verify the effectiveness of the model and methods.According to the numerical experiments and results aforementioned,the main conclusions of the thesis are summarized and managed,and the deficiencies and research prospects of this thesis are proposed by comparing them with relevant literature.