Developing a negotiation mechanism for agent-based scheduling via fuzzy constraints

The paper presents a negotiation mechanism for agent-based scheduling via fuzzy constraints. Scheduling is considered as a global consistency enforcing via iterative constraint adjustment and relaxation by agents. Fuzzy constraints, in this way, are used not only to represent the temporal relations that jobs being scheduled must satisfy, but also to specify the possibilities prescribing to what extent the solutions are suitable for scheduling to rank the solutions. The negotiation mechanism based on fuzzy constraint provides a systematic method to gradually relax the temporal constraints to generate a proposal, and then utilizes possibility functions to select an alternative schedule that is subject to the others' acceptability. Thus, each agent, who is in charge of different aspects of the problem, not only distributively solves its problems to maximize its local objectives, but also works together with other agents to attain a globally beneficial schedule. Experimental results suggest the proposed approach provides superior performance in all criteria to the contract net protocol and auction-based approaches.