ABSTRACT

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will contribute to the advancement of national prosperity and economic welfare by supporting research to study digital freight and logistics marketplaces. The freight transportation industry in the US is enormous in market size but is also extremely fragmented and suffers from inefficiency. Digital freight marketplaces that emerged over the last few years are reshaping the logistics industry by offering automated and efficient channels to connect carriers with shippers. This award supports research to develop a fundamental understanding of methodologies for designing and optimizing digital freight marketplaces. The research findings will facilitate the growing innovation in the freight transportation marketplaces through collaboration with leading freight marketplace companies. The research also will benefit small trucking carriers and owner-operators, which account for over 90% of all carriers in the U.S., by lowering the barrier for them to participate in freight marketplaces and providing them with steady work and reliable earnings. The accompanying educational plan aims to educate the trucking industry workforce about digital freight marketplaces and broaden STEM interest for underrepresented communities through hands-on activities.

Freight marketplaces face significant uncertainty from both the demand and supply side of the market, as they exhibit both geographical imbalance and seasonal volatility. This research will consider designing, analyzing, and optimizing marketplace control mechanisms for two-sided digital freight platforms. This research fills an important gap in the freight transportation literature, which mostly considers carriers with fixed capacities. This project considers a variety of market control mechanisms such as pricing, bundling, auction, and dedicated contracts; these mechanisms will need to be carefully coordinated to form an effective hybrid strategy while accounting for market participants who may strategically withhold their truthful preferences from the market operator. This research methodology will integrate fields such as statistical analysis and causal inference, stochastic models, approximate dynamic programming, auctions, and mechanism design. The performance assessments of the methods will be informed by available data and experiments in collaboration with freight industry partners who operate large-scale marketplaces.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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