Carrier assignment models in transportation procurement

This paper extends carrier assignment models used in winner determination auctions for transportation procurement to include shipper non-price objectives and carrier transit point costs. The models are unlike traditional carrier assignment models which incorporate only carrier lane bids, and different from combinatorial auction models which focus on packets of lanes without considering transit point costs. We develop solutions, including metaheuristics, for the new models and through computational experimentation show that the algorithms work well and can be easily implemented.