Abstract
In real-life multi-agent planning problems, long-term plans will often be invalidated by changes in the environment during or after the planning process. When this happens, short-term operational planning and scheduling methods have to be applied in order to deal with these changed situations. In addition to the dynamic environment, in such planning systems we also have to be aware of sometimes conflicting interests of different parties, which render a centralized approach undesirable. In this paper we investigate two agent-based scheduling architectures where stakeholders are modelled as autonomous agents. We discuss this approach in the context of an interesting airport planning problem: the planning and scheduling of deicing and anti-icing activities. To coordinate the competition between agents over scarce resources, we have developed two mechanisms: one mechanism based on decommitment penalties, and one based on a more traditional (Vickrey) auction. Experiments show that the auction-based mechanism best respects the preferences of the individual agents, whereas the decommitment mechanism ensures a fairer distribution of delay over the agents.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Smith, D.E., Frank, J., Jónsson, A.K.: Bridging the gap between planning and scheduling. Knowl. Eng. Rev. 15(1), 47–83 (2000)
Nisan, N., Ronen, A.: Algorithmic mechanism design. In: STOC 1999. Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 129–140. ACM Press, New York (1999)
Andelman, N., Azar, Y., Sorani, M.: Truthful approximation mechanisms for scheduling selfish related machines. In: Diekert, V., Durand, B. (eds.) STACS 2005. LNCS, vol. 3404, pp. 69–82. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Auletta, V., Prisco, R.D., Penna, P., Persiano, G.: Deterministic truthful approximation mechanisms for scheduling related machines. In: Diekert, V., Habib, M. (eds.) STACS 2004. LNCS, vol. 2996, pp. 608–619. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Kovács, A.: Fast monotone 3-approximation algorithm for scheduling related machines. In: Brodal, G.S., Leonardi, S. (eds.) ESA 2005. LNCS, vol. 3669, pp. 616–627. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Angel, E., Bampis, E., Pascual, F.: Truthful algorithms for scheduling selfish tasks on parallel machines. Theor. Comput. Sci. 369(1-3), 157–168 (2006)
Immorlica, N., Li, L., Mirrokni, V.S., Schulz, A.: Coordination mechanisms for selfish scheduling. In: Deng, X., Ye, Y. (eds.) WINE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3828, pp. 55–69. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Vermeulen, I., Bohte, S., Somefun, D., Poutré, J.L.: Improving patient schedules by multi-agent pareto appointment exchanging. In: CEC/EEE 2006. Proceedings of 2006 IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology, San Francisco, California, p. 9 (June 26-29, 2006)
Paulussen, T.O., Jennings, N.R., Decker, K.S., Heinzl, A.: Distributed patient scheduling in hospitals. In: IJCIA 2003, pp. 1224–1232. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2003)
Attanasio, A., Ghiani, G., Grandinetti, L., Guerriero, F.: Auction algorithms for decentralized parallel machine scheduling. Parallel Comput. 32(9), 701–709 (2006)
Lewin, R.: Embracing Complexity: Exploring the Application of Complex Adaptive Systems to Business. Ernst & Young (1996)
Parkes, D.C., Ungar, L.H.: An auction-based method for decentralized train scheduling. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Montreal, Canada, pp. 43–50. ACM Press, New York (2001)
’t Hoen, P.J., Poutre, J.A.L.: A decommitment strategy in a competitive multi-agent transportation setting. In: AAMAS 2003, pp. 1010–1011. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Sandholm, T., Lesser, V.: Leveled commitment contracts and strategic breach. Games and Economic Behaviour 25, 212–270 (2001)
Collins, J., Tsvetovas, M., Sundareswara, R., van Tonder, J., Gini, M., Mobasher, B.: Evaluating risk: flexibility and feasibility in multi-agent contracting. In: Agents 1999. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Seattle, WA, USA, pp. 350–351. ACM Press, Seattle, WA (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mao, X., ter Mors, A., Roos, N., Witteveen, C. (2007). Coordinating Competitive Agents in Dynamic Airport Resource Scheduling. In: Petta, P., Müller, J.P., Klusch, M., Georgeff, M. (eds) Multiagent System Technologies. MATES 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4687. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74949-3_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74949-3_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74948-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74949-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)