Secure Collaboration for Capacity Sharing in Logistics

Apr 14, 2004

Abstract

Sharing capacity across decentralized service providers can lead to
improvements in logistics efficiency. However, sharing the
information needed to determine if capacity can be shared poses
interesting problems. We focus on a problem faced by independent
trucking companies that have separate pickup and delivery tasks; the
identification of potential e ciency enhancing task swaps between
these companies. A second goal is to limit the information the
parties must reveal to identify these swaps. While secure multiparty
computation has solved this problem in theory, practical application
is still limted. This talk presents an efficient algorithm that finds
opportunities to swap loads without revealing any information except
the loads swapped, along with proofs of the security. A new concept
for secure multiparty computation is introduced: incentive
compatibility as a means of addressing malicious behavior. We also
apply this algorithm to an empirical dataset from a large
transportation company and present results that suggest significant
opportunities to improve efficiency through Pareto improving swaps.