2006 and case studies at wwwCom bineNetcom Today CombineNet employs 130 full

(2006) and case studies at -bineNet.com. Today CombineNet employs 130full time (about half of them in engi-neering) and a dozen academics asadvisors. The company has operationson four continents. It is headquarteredin Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA,with European headquarters in Berlin,Germany. It also has offices in Brus-sels, Belgium; Hamburg, Germany;Tokyo, Japan; and Beijing, China.AcknowledgmentsI thank the CombineNet employeesfor helping make this vision a reality.Special thanks go to Subhash Suri,David Levine, Tony Bonidy, Paul Mar-tyn, Andrew Gilpin, Rob Shields,Bryan Bailey, Andrew Fuqua, DavidParkes, George Nemhauser, CraigBoutilier, and Egon Balas. Com-bineNet, Expressive Bidding, Expres-sive Competition, Expressive Com-merce, Expressive Bid Taking,ClearBox, Combinatorial ExchangeDescription Language, and CEDL aretrademarks of CombineNet, Inc.ReferencesBoutilier, C. 2002. Solving ConciselyExpressed Combinatorial Auction Prob-lems. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Nation-al Conference on Artificial Intelligence. MenloPark, CA: AAAI Press.Boutilier, C.; Sandholm, T.; and Shields, R.2004. Eliciting Bid Taker Nonprice Prefer-ences in (Combinatorial) Auctions. In Pro-ceedings of the Nineteenth National Confer-ence on Artificial Intelligence. Menlo Park,CA: AAAI Press.Caplice, C., and Sheffi, Y. 2003. Optimiza-tion-Based Procurement for TransportationServices. Journal of Business Logistics24(2):109–128.Conitzer, V.; Derryberry, J.; and Sandholm,T. 2004. Combinatorial Auctions withStructured Item Graphs. In Proceedings ofthe Nineteenth National Conference on Artifi-cial Intelligence. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.de Vries, S., and Vohra, R. 2003. Combina-torial Auctions: A Survey. INFORMS Journalon Computing 15(3): 284–309.Fujishima, Y.; Leyton-Brown, K.; andShoham, Y. 1999. Taming the Computa-tional Complexity of Combinatorial Auc-tions: Optimal and ApproximateApproaches. InProceedings of the Sixteenthtion problem of finding the mostrobust allocation is even more com-plex than the clearing problem dis-cussed in most of this paper. We havedeveloped a prototype of automatedscenario navigation, and will solicitcustomer feedback soon.ImpactThe new sourcing paradigm and tech-nology has already had significantimpact. The technology developmentbegan in 1997 and CombineNet wasfounded in 2000. Between December2001 and now (December 2006),CombineNet has used ASAP to host447 highly combinatorial procure-ment events, totaling a spend of $35billion. The 60 plus buyer companieswere mostly among the Global 1000.A total of more than 12,000 suppliercompanies bid in our system. Theindividual events ranged from $2 mil-lion to $1.6 billion, representing themost complex combinatorial auctionsever conducted. They spanned a broadrange of categories such as transporta-tion (truckload, less-than-truckload,ocean freight, dray, bulk, intermodal,small parcel, air freight, train, fleet,freight forwarding, and other), directmaterials (sugars and sweeteners,meat, vegetables, honey, starches, col-orants, fibers and nonwovens, steel,fasteners, solvents, chemicals, casings,resins, and polymers), packaging (cans