Pricing in Multiagent Systems for Transportation Planning

Abstract

In electronic commerce, the intraorganizational coordination of directly responsible units, for example profit centers or firms within an affiliated group, is of increasing importance. These organizational units can be modeled within a multiagent system (MAS), an interconnection of autonomous information systems. In this article, we investigate coordination mechanisms for MAS in decentralized transportation planning that ensure efficient allocation of scarce resources on the basis of local planning processes. In the domain of transportation, planning problems are characterized by large amounts of data, limitations of time for planning, and the intractability of computational problems. Auctions as market-like coordination mechanisms are discussed with respect to the trade-off between theoretical evidence on the quality of the allocation and computational tractability. Therefore, 2 pricing mechanisms are investigated, the generalized Vickrey auction and pricing per column.