Management system for building production with multi-layer simultaneous auctions

Building production can be regarded as a one-piece production because not only specifications of individual buildings but also working environment for them are different. Additionally, different types of companies/enterprises participate in production. So, there are many uncertainties before production starts and disturbances occur frequently after production starts compared to production of general industrial products in a factory. Since it takes too much time to resolve problems with respect to such uncertainties/disturbances, a conventional production schedule has to include excessive slack/float. To resolve this issue, we propose a management system that consists of multiple agents and a bulletin board module to connect these agents. In the proposed system, both a job and a worker are regarded as agents. An autonomous job is referred to as a demand agent. A worker agent decomposes a job into some sub-jobs, that is, the worker agent generates new demand agents. A demand agent organizes an auction to find a worker agent which can perform a job corresponding to the demand agent itself and a worker agent bids for the demand agent to get the job. The bulletin board module, which controls the conveyance of information, realizes necessary and sufficient communications between agents. Furthermore, by introducing multi-layer simultaneous auctions, each worker agent can shorten its proposed timeline for a job, improving the accuracy of the estimation. As the result, a master schedule without excessive slack/float can be generated.