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This research incorporated an auction mechanism into the vehicle routing problem with occasional drivers and produced simulations in an agent-based environment. Auctions were used to match online orders with potential occasional drivers. While a centralized system optimizes system performance under global objectives, the novel decentralized approach presented here illustrates emergent phenomena resulting from the interaction of individual entities in highly dynamic cases. In the simulations, the auctions were executed after a fixed time interval called a rolling time horizon. Our results suggest that the appropriate rolling time horizon produces a lower average unit compensation cost because better matches can be found when the accumulation of online orders and occasional drivers is maintained at a certain level. The simulation results also indicate that the use of an auction mechanism instead of simple nonauction rules can improve the average unit compensation cost by up to 25.1%., Author(s): Chung-Wei Shen (corresponding author) [1,2]; Che-Cheng Hsu [1]; Kuan-Hua Tseng [1] 1. Introduction E-retail, with its revolutionary business model, is radically changing the way people shop. One of the [...]

The distributed trigger counting (DTC) problem is a fundamental block for many distributed applications. Particularly, such a problem is to raise an alert while the number of triggers received by the whole system reaches a pre-defined amount. There have been a few algorithms proposed to solve the DTC problem in the literature. However, these existing algorithms are all under the assumption that each process knows what kind of network topology the whole system forms as well as playing distinct kind of role in the system. The foregoing assumption is not practical for wireless sensor networks because the network topology of a wireless sensor network cannot be obtained in advance, and the roles of all processes are basically identical during the computation. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm to solve the DTC problem, free of any aforementioned global assumption. Moreover, in order to reduce the message complexity of our algorithm, we further propose a more message-efficient version, only with one extra requirement that all processes have learned ahead the number of processes in the system. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]