Towards Decentralised Agent-Based Inter-Company Scheduling

Liu, H., Keppens, J. and Luck, M.

Proceedings of the 3rd ECAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Logistics. 37-42.

August 2012

Abstract

This paper examines inter-company scheduling in scenarios where the companies wish to collaborate with one another but are not prepared to reveal operations or sales information. For example, this type of scenario occurs when multiple small to medium sized manufacturers of the same or similar products wish to pool their resources to meet larger orders even though they remain competitors with one another. Conventional approaches to inter-company scheduling are inappropriate in such situations because they rely on companies to reveal potentially sensitive information to one another or to a third party. This paper presents a novel fully decentralised agent-based approach to inter-company scheduling that substitutes information sharing for negotiation. The performance of this approach is assessed in a range of simple scenarios consisting of only two companies.

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