EFFICIENT HEURISTICS FOR OPTIMALLY MATCHING BUYERS AND SELLERS IN E-MARKETPLACES
Bui Cong Giao
This thesis addresses the problem of matching buyers and sellers in barter trade exchange e-marketplaces. A barter trade exchange is a collection of businesses that buy and sell products among themselves. The collection of businesses is viewed as a micro-economy, so that matching is viewed from an economic perspective. An optimal matching seeks to maximize trade volume and to ensure that all companies share in the trade. The matching problem is given a formal representation and an efficient heuristic search algorithm is developed to solve it. The quality of solution of the heuristic search algorithm is evaluated by comparing it to the optimal solution obtained by exhaustive search on a large set of problems. The algorithm is shown to be fast enough to deal with very large real-world problems. The developed technique has the potential to greatly benefit the barter trade exchange industry as the size of trade exchanges grows.