AN AGENT-BASED COOPERATIVE MECHANISM FOR INTEGRATED PRODUCTION AND TRANSPORTATION PLANNING

This paper presents a decentralized cooperative economic scheduling mechanism for a supply chain environment. For this purpose, we design autonomous agents that minimize the production or transportation costs and outsourcing costs incurred by the external execution of a task. The decentralized cooperative scheduling approach comprises two parts: the individual optimization an agent\u27s local schedule and the cooperative contract optimization, either by outsourcing the task or by (re-)contracting the release time and due time with the contract partners aiming to maximize their total profits. A negotiation mechanism based on trust accounts is employed to protect the agents against systematic exploitation by their partners

A Trust-based Negotiation Mechanism for Decentralized Economic Scheduling

Abstract — This paper presents a decentralized negotiation protocol for cooperative economic scheduling in a supply chain environment. For this purpose we designed autonomous agents that maximize their profits by optimizing their local schedule and offer side payments to compensate other agents for lost profit or extra expense if cumulative profit is achievable. To further increase their income the agents have to apply a randomized local search heuristic to prevent the negotiation from stopping in locally optimal contracts. We show that the welfare could be increased by using a search strategy similar to Simulated Annealing. Unfortunately, a naïve application of this strategy makes the agents vulnerable to exploitation by untruthful partners. We develop and test a straightforward mechanism based on trust accounts to protect the agents against systematic exploitation. This “Trusted ” Simulated Annealing mechanism assures truthful revelation of the individual opportunity cost situation as the basis for the calculation of side payments. I