Decision support for combinatorial reverse auction with multiple buyers and sellers

Abstract

We consider a multiple buyers/sellers combinatorial reverse auction problem in which multiple buyers want to acquire items from a set of sellers to process the task on hand. Each seller owns a set of items to bid for the required items requested by the buyers. The problem is to determine the winners to minimize the total cost to perform acquire the required items. The main results include: (1) a problem formulation for the winner determination problem; (2) a solution methodology based on Lagrangian relaxation; (3) analysis of numerical results obtained by our algorithms. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.