Abstract

The project addresses cost savings and productivity improvement by pooling of resources between independent companies through multi-agent, bargaining-based decision methods. Cost savings are realized by optimizing plans across companies, while the pooling decision and the benefit distribution is done by bargaining. Applications with these characteristics are wide-spread including logistics (pooling of fleets) and manufacturing (joint manufacturing plans).
This thesis comprises the project proposal as a research project submitted to the Sixth Framework Programme, Information Society Technologies, and the realization of the proof-of-concept. This proof is provided by the design and implementation a prototype optimizer for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CapVRP) in order to simulated pooling versus non-pooling strategies based on a - simplified - business case.
The optimizer uses the genetic algorithm meta-heuristic. Extensive experimentation using published CapVRP instances and benchmarks leads to the delivery of the proof-ofconcept.