A (μ,λ )-coordination mechanism for agent-based multi-project scheduling

摘要

A new generic negotiation-based mechanism to coordinate project planning software agents to share resources among projects is described. The mechanism, which takes into account asymmetric information and opportunistic behavior, is concretized for the decentralized resource constrained multi-project scheduling problem, and evaluated on 80 benchmark instances taken from the literature and 60 newly generated instances. Computational tests show that the proposed mechanism comes close to results obtained by central solution methods. For twelve benchmark instances new best solutions could be computed.