An auction-and-negotiation based procurement strategy for multiple splitable items

To solve the mismatch problem of supply and demand when purchasing multiple splitable items, a new procurement strategy is proposed based on the mechanism of auction and negotiation in this paper. In the proposed strategy, a candidate set of winning bidders is firstly determined by maximizing the expected procurement savings, and then their negotiation order is achieved according to the maximal negotiation benefits, and finally the negotiation termination condition of winning bidders is given in order to match the relationship of each item's supply and demand. Numerical experiments show that the proposed procurement mechanism can deal with this splitable multi-item procurement problem effectively.