Inter-agent cooperation and communication for agent-based robust dynamic scheduling in steel production

  • Authors:

  • D. Ouelhadj;S. Petrovic;P. I. Cowling;A. Meisels

  • Affiliations:

  • Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group, School of Computer Science and IT, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK;Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group, School of Computer Science and IT, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK;Modelling Optimisation Scheduling and Intelligent Computing Research Group, Department of Computing, University of Bradford, Bradford BD7 1DP, UK;Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel

  • Venue:
  • Advanced Engineering Informatics
  • Year:
  • 2004

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper describes a negotiation protocol proposed for inter-agent cooperation in a multi-agent system that we developed for optimisation and dynamic integrated scheduling within steel production. The negotiation protocol is a two-level bidding mechanism based on the Contract Net Protocol. The purpose of this protocol is to allow the agents to cooperate and coordinate their local schedules in order to find globally near-optimal robust schedules, whilst minimising the disruption caused by the occurrence of unexpected real-time events. We conduct several experiments to investigate the performance of this negotiation protocol to coordinate the agents in generating good quality robust schedules. This performance is evaluated in terms of stability and utility measures used to evaluate the robustness of the steel production processes in the presence of real-time events.