CP-IP Techniques for the Bid Evaluation in Combinatorial Auctions

Combinatorial auctions are an important e-commerce application where bidders can bid on combinations of items. The problem of selecting the best bids that cover all items, i.e., the Winner Determination Problem (WDP), is NP-hard. In this paper we consider the time constrained variant of this problem, that is the Bid Evaluation Problem (BEP) where temporal windows and precedence constraints are associated to each task in the bid. We propose different algorithms based on CP, IP and a hybrid approach based on both of them. We show that even the simplest pure CP based approach outperforms the only existing approach. We selected a set of algorithms which do not dominate each other. We identified a set of instance-dependent structural features that enable to select the best class of algorithms to apply. This is the first step toward an automatic algorithm selection in algorithm portfolios.