Competitive Performance Assessment of Dynamic Vehicle Routing Technologies Using Sequential Auctions

This paper compares technologies for a dynamic truckload pickup and delivery problem in a competitive environment using sequential auctions. In this environment, demands arrive randomly over time and are described by pick up, delivery locations and hard timewindows. Upon demand arrival, carriers compete for the loads in a second price auction. Four fleet assignment technologies with different degrees of sophistication are tested using simulations. The technologies differ in how they deal with the combinatorial and stochastic elements of the online problem. A one-step look-ahead dynamic vehicle routing technology which tries to estimate the impact of current decisions on serving future loads (not yet arrived) is introduced. The performance of each technology is analyzed in relation to different demand characteristics.