Institute of Transportation, MOTC

Ying-Hsiang Huang, 2008.07
Institute of Traffic and Transportation National Chiao Tung University

　　As the importance of logistic demands have been growing in decades, the road freight becomes highly competitive. Motor carriers who want to survive in the market must try to increase their revenue and reduce expenditure. Due to the advancement of IT, motor carriers have more service opportunities through the auction in the e-marketplaces except for traditional contract. Furthermore, in order to avoid the meaningless loss, motor carriers can increase profit by reducing frequencies of empty moving. The purpose of this paper aims at integrating the load information with motor carriers’ plans of fleet management in the e-marketplaces, and propose optimal dynamic bidding strategy based on combinatorial auctions. 　　

This study discusses how to choose, evaluate, and price the optimal auctioned loads in the views of truckload motor carriers, according to the procurement auction in the e-marketplaces. Once lucky truckload motor carriers win the bidding, they allocate trucks based on the bidding results. Otherwise, “contingency planning” is necessary to decide the second option in the remaining time. Therefore, this paper designs an algorithm for motor carriers to adopt the optimal bidding strategies in the dynamic e-marketplaces. Also, contingency planning is brought to deal with the bidding results and the uncertainty of load demand, and it can increase profit effectively.