A multi-round exchange mechanism for carrier collaboration in less than truckload transportation

We propose an iterative request exchange mechanism to solve carrier collaboration in less than truckload transportation. In each iteration, each carrier first provides multiple bundles of requests to offer and their corresponding transfer payments. Each carrier then determines which bundles of requests to acquire from one or multiple carriers. Multiple bundles of requests can be exchanged among carriers in each iteration. In each round of the auction, each carrier updates its outsourcing bundles of requests based on the feedback information from previous iterations. Numerical experiments show that this multi-round exchange mechanism provides 11.80% more profit compared to other mechanisms.