Transportation Logistics Services from Cloud

One of the remarkable recent business trends is shifting to cloud as more services as possible. This is peculiar for not only simple services like e-commerce, but also sophisticated ones making available, for the customers, to exploit SaaS (Software as Services) market model. The paper presents the developed abstract architecture of the SaaS transportation planning service. The core functionality of this architecture is generic model and associated protocol of auction -- based multi-agent resource allocation and scheduling procedure comprising standard phases of the auction managed by multiple generic policies. The latter is introduced as a standard object class that provides for flexibility of planning as well as reusability of the core planning software that is à critical property of the software implementing any web service.