Proposal of Distributed Scheduling Heuristics Using Mediation Agent

摘要

This paper proposes an agent-based distributed scheduling system against the background of the deregulation of electric utility and the smart grid for the renewable energy, and then focuses on a maintenance scheduling in the context of real problems. A synchronous backtrack algorithm, a well-known method for distributed scheduling problems, has difficulties handling (A) rapid schedule adjustments and (B) impartial assignment. Thus, this paper proposes two kinds of heuristics: (1) parallel assignment and (2) multiple priority strategies, and developed the distributed scheduling system which makes use of the heuristics. It consists of schedulers for each power station and mediation agents which have cloning and merging functions to support the implementation of the heuristics. Finally, the result of experiment shows an improvement when handling the rapid adjustment and the impartiality issues with reasonable computational overhead.