Winner Determination

Auctioning multi-dimensional items is a key challenge, which requires rigorous tools. This study proposes a multi-round, first-score, semi-sealed multi-attribute reverse auction system. A fundamental concern in multi-attribute auctions is acquiring a useful description of the buyers’ individuated requirements: hard constraints and qualitative preferences. To consider real requirements, we express dependencies among attributes. Indeed, our system enables buyers eliciting conditional constraints as well as conditional preferences. However, determining the winner with diverse criteria may be very time consuming. Therefore, it is more useful for our auction to process quantitative data. A challenge here is to satisfy buyers with more facilities, and at the same time keep the auctions efficient. To meet this challenge, our system maps the qualitative preferences into a multi-criteria decision rule. It also completely automates the winner determination since it is a very difficult task for buyers to estimate quantitatively the attribute weights and define attributes value functions. Our procurement auction looks for the outcome that satisfies all the constraints and best matches the preferences. We demonstrate the feasibility and measure the time performance of the proposed system through a 10-attribute auction. Finally, we assess the user acceptance of our requirements specification and winner selection tool.

— This study introduces a new type of Combinatorial Reverse Auction (CRA), products with multi-units, multi-attributes and multi-objectives, which are subject to buyer and seller constraints. In this advanced CRA, buyers may maximize some attributes and minimize some others. To address the Winner Determination (WD) problem in the presence of multiple conflicting objectives, we propose an optimization approach based on genetic algorithms. To improve the quality of the winning solution, we incorporate our own variants of the diversity and elitism strategies. We illustrate the WD process based on a real case study. Afterwards, we validate the proposed approach through artificial datasets by generating large instances of our multi-objective CRA problem. The experimental results demonstrate on one hand the performance of our WD method in terms of three quality metrics, and on the other hand, its significant superiority to well-known heuristic and exact WD techniques that have been defined for simpler CRAs (BEST PAPER AWARD)

Utility companies can organize e-auctions to procure electricity from other suppliers during peak load periods. For this purpose, we develop an efficient Combinatorial Reverse Auction (CRA) to purchase power from diverse sources, residents and plants. Our auction is different from what has been implemented in the electricity markets. In our CRA, which is subject to trading constraints, an item denotes a time slot that has two conflicting attributes, energy volume and its price. To ensure the security of energy, we design our auction with two bidding rounds: the first one is for variable-energy suppliers and the second one for other sources, like controllable load and renewable energy. Determining the winner of CRAs is a computational hard problem. We view this problem as an optimization of resource allocation that we solve with multi-objective genetic algorithms to find the best solution. The latter represents the best combination of suppliers that lowers the price and increases the energy.

Auctioning multi-dimensional items is a key challenge, which requires rigorous tools. This study proposes a multi-round, first-score, semi-sealed multi-attribute reverse auction system. A fundamental concern in multi-attribute auctions is acquiring a useful description of the buyers’ individuated requirements: hard constraints and qualitative preferences. To consider real requirements, we express dependencies among attributes. Indeed, our system enables buyers eliciting conditional constraints as well as conditional preferences. However, determining the winner with diverse criteria may be very time consuming. Therefore, it is more useful for our auction to process quantitative data. A challenge here is to satisfy buyers with more facilities, and at the same time keep the auctions efficient. To meet this challenge, our system maps the qualitative preferences into a multi-criteria decision rule. It also completely automates the winner determination since it is a very difficult task for buyers to estimate quantitatively the attribute weights and define attributes value functions. Our procurement auction looks for the outcome that satisfies all the constraints and best matches the preferences. We demonstrate the feasibility and measure the time performance of the proposed system through a 10-attribute auction. Finally, we assess the user acceptance of our requirements specification and winner selection tool.

Winner(s) determination in online reverse auctions is a very
appealing e-commerce application. This is a combinatorial optimization problem
where the goal is to find an optimal solution meeting a set of requirements and
minimizing a given procurement cost. This problem is hard to tackle especially
when multiple attributes of instances of items are considered together with
additional constraints, such as seller’s stocks and discount rate. The challenge
here is to determine the optimal solution in a reasonable computation time.
Solving this problem with a systematic method will guarantee the optimality of
the returned solution but comes with an exponential time cost. On the other
hand, approximation techniques such as evolutionary algorithms are faster but
trade the quality of the solution returned for the running time. In this paper, we
conduct a comparative study of several exact and evolutionary techniques that
have been proposed to solve various instances of the combinatorial reverse
auction problem. In particular, we show that a recent method based on genetic
algorithms outperforms some other methods in terms of time efficiency while
returning a near to optimal solution in most of the cases.

The option of organizing E-auctions to purchase electricity required for anticipated peak load period is a new one for utility companies. To meet the extra demand load, we develop electricity combinatorial reverse auction (CRA) for the purpose of procuring power from diverse energy sources. In this new, smart electricity market, suppliers of different scales can participate, and home-owners may even take an active role. In our CRA, an item, which is subject to several trading constraints, denotes a time slot that has two conflicting attributes, electricity quantity and price. To secure electricity, we design our auction with two bidding rounds: round one is exclusively for variable energy, and round two allows storage and non-intermittent renewable energy to bid on the remaining items. Our electricity auction leads to a complex winner determination (WD) task that we represent as a resource procurement optimization problem. We solve this problem using multi-objective genetic algorithms in order to find the trade-off solution that best lowers the price and increases the quantity. This solution consists of multiple winning suppliers, their prices, quantities and schedules. We validate our WD approach based on large-scale simulated datasets. We first assess the time-efficiency of our WD method, and we then compare it to well-known heuristic and exact WD techniques. In order to gain an exact idea about the accuracy of WD, we implement two famous exact algorithms for our constrained combinatorial procurement problem.