Decision recommendation system for transporters in an online freight exchange platform

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of decision making for transporters in an online freight exchange platform. Two properties of online freight exchange makes the decision making challenging for a transporter — highly competitive nature of the market and, uncertainty in availability of consignments. Additionally the driver's return to the home location within a predefined duration is yet another challenge in the decision making process. In order to secure a contract to carry a consignment, a transporter needs to take part in an online auction process. So a transporter needs to take the decision whether to bid for a consignment from the set of available consignments or to wait for some time in order to get a better consignment. We develop an algorithm which recommends the best decision prior to taking part in such an auction. The evaluation results of the proposed algorithm achieves maximized profits and within a pre-decided duration of time — from home location to destination(s) and again back to home — as set by the driver. It also performs better in terms of our objective function when compared with a naive greedy decision making algorithm.