Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

2357. Questioning the Privacy Assumption: The Risk of Unintended Information Leakage in Auction-Based Carrier Collaborations

Invited abstract in session WB-10: Collaborative delivery, stream Mobility, Transportation, and Traffic.

Wednesday, 10:45-12:15
Room: H16

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Steffen Elting
Universität Wien
2. Jan Fabian Ehmke
Business Decisions and Analytics, University of Vienna
3. Margaretha Gansterer
Department of Operations, Energy and Environmental Management, University of Klagenfurt

Abstract

In the context of the climate crisis and a growing demand for efficient logistics, auction-based horizontal carrier collaborations have emerged as a promising solution to optimize delivery operations. These collaborations enable carriers to reallocate delivery orders among themselves, reducing costs and environmental impact. Despite their many benefits, combinatorial auctions might be vulnerable to a leakage of private carrier information, such as the locations of delivery orders that are not released for auction.
This study investigates the extent to which these locations can be inferred by an auctioneer using data-driven optimization techniques, thus questioning the assumption of carriers having full control over the dissemination of their private information. The auctioneer cannot validate any location estimates it makes, since the true coordinates of unreleased orders are unknown. The only information available are the carriers' bids on order bundles, selected by the auctioneer. Thus, we propose a proxy objective that minimizes the loss between true and estimated bids by imitating a carrier's bidding process.
Employing derivative-free black-box optimization methods, we find that the auctioneer can indeed infer spatial dispersion patterns, but that the precise identification of individual order locations remains challenging. The results underscore the need for further exploration of unwanted information leakage in seemingly privacy-preserving collaboration mechanisms and the development of robust frameworks that do not trade data security for collaboration gains. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on sustainable and efficient carrier collaborations, offering valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners in the field of city logistics.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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