Transportation auctions are increasingly made online and the bidding time intervals are becoming much shorter. From the carriers’ perspective, bid determination problems need to be solved more quickly due to the increasing number of auctions in the online transportation marketplace for their survivability. In this research, we study the bid price determination problem of truckload (TL) carriers participating in multiple independent first-price sealed-bid single-request TL transportation auctions simultaneously. The carriers must win the right combination of auctions to ensure profitability. The high level of competition, the uncertainty of the outcomes of the auctions, and the independence of the auctions from each other constitute the main challenge in this setting. In order to solve this problem, we develop an efficient heuristic which identifies the auctions to participate and determines the carriers’ bids in the selected auctions. We demonstrate the efficiency and the effectiveness of our proposed heuristic by simulating a competitive auction-based transportation procurement marketplace under various parameter settings. The simulations show that our proposed heuristic performs close to an existing approach found in the literature with much less computational effort.

运输拍卖越来越多地在线进行，竞标时间间隔越来越短。从运营商的角度来看，由于在线运输市场中出于生存目的的拍卖数量不断增加，因此需要更快地解决出价确定问题。在这项研究中，我们研究了同时参与多个独立的第一价格密封报价单请求TL运输拍卖的卡车（TL）承运人的投标价格确定问题。运营商必须赢得正确的拍卖组合，以确保获利。在这种情况下，主要的挑战是竞争激烈，拍卖结果的不确定性以及拍卖彼此之间的独立性。为了解决这个问题，我们开发了一种有效的启发式方法，可以识别参与的拍卖并确定所选拍卖中的承运人出价。通过在各种参数设置下模拟竞争性的基于拍卖的运输采购市场，我们证明了我们提出的启发式方法的效率和有效性。仿真表明，我们提出的启发式算法与文献中发现的现有方法非常接近，而所需的计算量却少得多。