Automated Negotiation for Decentralised Scheduling

Abstract

This paper is concerned with inter-company scheduling between manufacturers of similar products who wish to pool resources for their mutual benefit, but without sharing commercially sensitive situation such as order lists and production technology with one another and without the need for a third-party brokerage infrastructure. The ultimate objective of this work is to enable small-scale manufacturers, which may be competitors in certain markets, to achieve some of the economies of scale of their larger counterparts. To accomplish this, the paper introduces a simple agent-negotiation approach that is able to identify mutually beneficial resource transactions.