Planning transport of crude oil derivatives with simultaneous auctions

In supply chains of the petroleum industry, maintaining a balance between production and consumption of petroleum derivatives is a crucial issue. Basically, this kind of chain has several elements like producer bases, consumer bases, intermediary terminals that are linked by a transport network. These elements should cooperate to reach the global balance of the system with a minimum transportation cost. In this context, this paper proposes and compares two solutions based on auctions carried out by agents, which represent the elements of the aforementioned chain. These solutions are characterized respectively by the execution of sequential auctions and simultaneous auctions in order to consumers bid for batches of crude oil derivatives. In the comparative tests, the solution based on simultaneous auctions is better than the sequential one mainly because of the intense cooperation among agents.