Declarative specification and solution of combinatorial auctions using logic programming

Abstract

In a combinatorial auction problem bidders are allowed to bid on a bundle of items. The auctioneer has to select a subset of the bids so as to maximize the price it gets, and of course making sure that it does not accept multiple bids that have the same item as each item can be sold only once. In this paper we show how the combinatorial auction problem and many of its extensions can be expressed in logic programming based systems such as Smodels and dlv. We propose this as an alternative to the standard syntax specific specialized implementations that are much harder to modify and extend when faced with generalizations and additional constraints. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.