Evolutionary Techniques for Reverse Auctions

Winner determination is one of the main challenges in combinatorial auctions. However, not much work has been done to solve this problem in the case of reverse auctions using evolutionary techniques. This has motivated us to propose an improvement of a genetic algorithm based method, we have previously proposed, to address two important issues in the context of combinatorial reverse auctions: determining the winner(s) in a reasonable processing time, and reducing the procurement cost. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed method in practice, we conduct several experiments on combinatorial reverse auctions instances. The results we report in this paper clearly demonstrate the efficiency of our new method in terms of processing time and procurement cost.