AFEX: An Autonomous Freight Exchange Concept

The more efficient configuration and coordination of multimodal transports is a topic consistently emerging in the last decades. Several projects, like e.g. LOGFOR, CODE24 and CENTRAL EUROPE, make efforts to achieve progress in this area. This paper presents an already implemented and tested software prototype for the configuration of multimodal supply chains and describes how this prototype, which emerged from the CODE24 project, is able to facilitate contact between potential business partners and it is shown how the implementation of the prototype and the research into freight exchanges led the authors of this paper to a new market place concept: AFEX – Agent-based Freight Exchanges. It is shown how these yet to be implemented, highly automated and interconnected market places will alleviate problems commonly associated with existing market places and provide support for decentralized and autonomous software agents to perform contractually binding auctions of multimodal freight transport services utilizing a double-sided combinatorial auction model. Finally, an outlook on prospective concepts which support the negotiation of contracts for multimodal transport services using multi-agent systems is given.