An enhanced approach for solving winner determination problem in reverse combinatorial auctions

Abstract

When a disaster occurs, the single agent does not have complete knowledge about the circumstances of the disaster. Therefore, the rescue agents should coordinate with each other to perform their allocated tasks efficiently. However, the task allocation process among rescue agents is a complex problem, which is NP-complete problem, and determining the rescue agents that will perform the tasks efficiently is the main problem, which is called the winner determination problem (WDP). This paper proposed an enhanced approach to improve rescue agents’ tasks allocation processes for WDP in reverse combinatorial auctions. The main objective of the proposed approach is to determine the winning bids that will perform the corresponding tasks with minimum cost. The task allocation problem in this paper was transformed into a two-dimensional array, and then the proposed approach was applied to it. The main contribution of the proposed approach is to shorten the search space size to determine the winners and allocate the corresponding tasks for a combination of agents (i.e., more than two agents). The proposed approach was compared to the genetic algorithm regarding the execution time, and the results showed good performance and effectiveness of the proposed approach.