Auction-based transport services allocation in Physical Inter-net: a simulation framework

The Physical Internet concept proposes a new way to move goods towards customers across a network of interconnected logistics services. According to this concept, the containerized goods travel form one hub to another until reaching their final destination. This principle implies that each container finds the best service on its route. The logistics service providers and then the carriers offer services (transport between hubs) accordingly. In this way, the allocation of a service to a provider becomes more dynamic and an efficient mechanism between offers and demands is required. We propose a combinatorial auction mechanism based on mechanism design theory to efficiently allocate bundles of containers to transport services. The hypotheses are described and the mechanism is divided into different processes called rules. The con-tribution of this work is based on the ability of the Physical Internet to reallocate a container to carrier at each hub if it improves the routing of the container and the utilization of the logistics network resources. An exam-ple illustrates how the proposed mechanism will work at the level of a single hub and how container bundles are allocated to carriers.