An intelligent brokering system to support multi-agent web-based 4th-party logistics

Abstract

An intelligent agent-based framework that supports fourth-party logistics (4PL) operations on the web is proposed in this paper. In our system, customers specify job requests over the web dynamically. An eMarket Place allows intelligent third-party logistics (3PL) agents to bid for customers' job requests. The intelligence lies on the e-Market Place to optimally decide which agents' bids should be satisfied based on a set of pre-determined factors (pricing, preferences and fairness). We model the underlying brokering problem as a Set Packing Problem (SPP), which is 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.