Co-operative scheduling for a resource-bounded multiagent planning system
Abdel‐Illah Mouaddib · Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence · 2004
This paper presents the multistage negotiation protocol that contributes to a more sophisticated distributed scheduling for progressive reasoning. This reasoning is introduced to solve problems where it is not computationally feasible or economically desirable to compute the optimal solution. Its flexibility, combined with parallel and faster processing of distributed artificial intelligence methods, allows the improvement of the centralized technique of scheduling. Indeed, scheduling is distributed among agents while negotiation is performed to solve impasses between local schedules. This negotiation is based on flexing local schedules by discarding the least important reasoning levels to borrow resources. The progressive structure of agents facilitates the solving of impasses by discarding the deepest levels such that rescheduling is avoided. A system is designed where each progressive reasoning agent is completely autonomous and then it is up to locally build its schedule and to co-ordinate it with the other. This approach is an important application of the contract-net technique to the scheduling of progressive reasoning agents. This approach is dedicated to the distributed station resource management application.