Using simulation to evaluate how multi-agent transportation planners cope with truck breakdowns

In most real-world settings, a transportation plan requires modifications during execution. A thorough evaluation of transportation planning methods thus requires testing and comparison in a dynamic environment. We give conditions on a simulation environment that follow from this requirement, and propose a multi-agent simulator meeting these...

A Qualitative Vickrey Auction

The negative conclusions of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem|that only dictatorial social choice functions are non-manipulable|can be overcome by restricting the class of admissible preference profiles. A common approach is to assume that the preferences of the agents can be represented by quasilinear utility functions. This restriction allows...

Incorporating Expert Knowledge in Decision Support for Logistics: Balancing Costs and Customer Relations

Decision support within transport companies should not only use traditional objective functions, but also reason about qualitative effects on all involved actors. We propose a fuzzy logic rule base that can be used in addition to traditional operation research tools to calculate not just optimal solutions, but solutions that are optimal with...

Multi-Attribute Vickrey Auctions when Utility Functions are Unknown

Multi-attribute auctions allow negotiations over multiple attributes besides price. For example in task allocation, service providers can define their service by means of multiple attributes, such as quality of service, deadlines, or delay penalties. Auction mechanisms assume that the players have evaluation functions over the space of...

Distributed Agent Platform for advanced logistics