Article ID: | iaor20073263 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 150 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 115 |
End Page Number: | 135 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2007 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Giordani Stefano, Confessore Giuseppe, Rismondo Silvia |
Keywords: | heuristics |
We consider a multi-project scheduling problem, where each project is composed of a set of activities, with precedence relations, requiring specific amounts of local and shared (among projects) resources. The aim is to complete all the project activities, satisfying precedence and resource constraints, and minimizing each project schedule length. The decision making process is supposed to be decentralized, with as many local decision makers as the projects. A multi-agent system model, and an iterative combinatorial auction mechanism for the agent coordination are proposed. We provide a dynamic programming formulation for the combinatorial auction problem, and heuristic algorithms for both the combinatorial auction and the bidding process. An experimental analysis on the whole multi-agent system model is discussed.