Auction mechanism-based order allocation for third-party vehicle logistics platforms

By integrating social transportation capacity and matching transportation needs, third-party vehicle logistics platforms could efficiently make full use of logistics resources and reduce logistics costs. For a vehicle logistics platform in the future, the adopted strategy for order allocation determines whether the platform could win the competition in a complex business environment to a large extent. After investigating the order allocation ideas proposed by designers of third-party vehicle logistics platforms, we find these ideas typically lead to low efficiency of transportation and cannot solve the problem that is difficult for platforms to obtain accurate information. Besides, it also can be seen that the current order allocation idea rarely considers the impact of goodwill on the platform. To conduct a more efficient order allocation for third-party vehicle logistics platforms, this paper proposes a new allocation method based on the auction mechanism. The proposed auction method could achieve the long-term operation of platforms by weighing and adjusting the revenue of platforms and fleets with second price. According to experiments and analysis, the allocation method proposed in this paper can be more effectively applied to solve the order allocation problem of vehicle logistics platforms than other compared methods, which helps platforms to achieve better economic benefits and goodwill in long-term operations.