An Intelligent Brokering System to support Multi-Agent Web-Based 4th Party Logistics

• Main Authors: LAU, Hoong Chuin, GOH, Y. G.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2002
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Business; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1122; http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TAI.2002.1180800
• Institution: Singapore Management University

An intelligent agent-based framework that supports fourth-party logistics (4PL) operations on the Web is proposed. In our system, customers specify job requests over the Web dynamically. An e-marketplace allows intelligent third-party logistics (3PL) agents to bid for customers' job requests. The intelligence lies in the e-marketplace optimally deciding which agents' bids should be satisfied based on a set of predetermined factors (pricing, preferences and fairness). We model the underlying brokering problem as a set packing problem (SPP), an NP-hard optimization problem. An iterative greedy approximation algorithm is proposed to solve the SPP, and experimental results show its effectiveness against the classical greedy method proposed by Chvatal (1979).