University of Giessen, Business Informatics

Licher Strasse 70, D-35394 Giessen, Germany

phone: (+49) 0641/99-22614, fax: (+49) 0641/99-22619

In Electronic Commerce, the intra-organizational co-ordination of directly responsible units, e. g., profit-centers or firms within an affiliated group, is of increasing importance. These organizational units can be modeled within a Multi-Agent System (MAS), an interconnection of autonomous information systems. This paper investigates co-ordination mechanisms for MAS in decentralized transportation planning that ensure efficient allocation of scarce resources on the basis of local planning processes. In the domain of transportation, planning problems are characterized by large amounts of data, limitations of time for planning and the intractability of computational problems. Auctions as market-like co-ordination mechanisms are discussed with respect to the trade-off between theoretical evidence on the quality of the allocation and computational tractability. Therefore, two pricing mechanisms are investigated, the Generalized Vickrey Auction (GVA) and Pricing Per Column (PPC).