Collaborative single and parallel machine scheduling by autonomous agents

Abstract

Collaborative interorganizational systems is a relevant and promising research domain. When autonomous agents associated with different enterprises negotiate about rival resources, coordination is a major challenge. Information provided by the agents is a fruit of a poisonous tree because the selfish agents have an incentive to lie strategically which makes the revealed information unreliable and misleading for a central authority. Moreover, the agents might not be willing to reveal information due to privacy concerns. Thus, there is a need for sophisticated mechanisms in collaborative systems that facilitate the coordination of non-cooperative agents. This paper deals with rival machine scheduling of one or more homogeneous machines by autonomous agents. Overall objectives are the minimization of the collective total weighted tardiness and Pareto efficient outcomes. We have developed a mediated negotiation protocol drawing on quotas for the acceptance of contract proposals. The protocol ensures that the agents accept sufficient proposals such that they can overcome individual local optima and achieve Pareto superior outcomes. For evaluation purposes, we have conducted several computational experiments. The experiments show that the proposed protocol achieves beneficial outcomes.

Design of automated negotiation mechanisms for decentralized heterogeneous machine scheduling

“…Preliminary versions of the later used negotiation protocol framework are presented in Lang and Fink (2012a, 2012b, 2012c. This study is different from previous ones insofar that we elaborate on a self-interested multi-agent paradigm for operational research, introduce and tackle a novel hard scheduling problem, and evaluate the negotiation protocol framework for a relevant decentralized optimization problem.…”

Collaborative machine scheduling: Challenges of individually optimizing behavior

“…Based on the work of Klein et al [22], Fink [21] proposes a quotas-based negotiation protocol with acceptance quotas over time and applies it to supply chain coordination. Homberger [51] adapted the protocol to multi-level lot sizing, and Lang and Fink [41,52,53] suggest and evaluate extensions for this protocol. Similarly, Fujita et al [54] use an approach that uses issue grouping and a limited amount of certain responses.…”

“…Finally, there are just a few works we are aware of that address the issue of autonomous agents, which is the focus of this paper. One of those is the preliminary study of this paper [52] as well as the paper of Lang et al [20], which analyzes the negotiation of a complex scheduling application incorporating heterogeneous machines, machine operating costs, and nonlinear cost functions. Besides, Liu et al [75] propose a negotiation mechanism for inter-company scheduling with shared resources.…”