A family of market-based shipment methodologies for delivery supply chain

Load building is an important step to make the delivery supply chain efficient. We present a family of load makeup algorithms using market control-based strategy, named LoadMarket, in order to build efficient loads where each load consists of a certain number of finished products having destinations. LoadMarket adopts minimum spanning tree graph algorithm for generating initial endowment for Load Traders who cooperate to minimize either total travel distance or the variance with respect to the travel distances of loads through a spot market or double-sided auction market mechanism. For the simulated load shipment market, the efficiency of the LoadMarket algorithms is analyzed using simulation experiments.