Distribute the Selfish Ambitions

The distributed project scheduling problem is a distributed resource allocation problem extended with temporal constraints. Herein a project consists of a series of activities, the scarce resources are assigned to those activities at certain time windows such that all the activities are performed and certain objectives are optimized. In the past, methods from Operations Research (OR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) were proposed to tackle this problem in a centralized manner. However, such centralized methods appear to be for many real-world applications impractical and infeasible due to the distribution of information, changes in willingness to cooperate and the decision autonomy of individual actors. Furthermore, long term schedules are likely to be invalidated by the dynamic changes in the environment. In this paper, we investigate this more dynamic problem in the context of Airport Ground Handling (AGH), where airlines and ground handlers are working together to deliver ground services during aircraft turnaround times. Although parties involved in AGH process cooperate, they may have their own selfish ambitions. For instance, in the scheduling process, airlines and ground service providers do not share a unified objective. In this paper, a multiagent online heuristic approach is proposed. We employ in this approach a market mechanism that balances the interests of airlines and ground service providers for scheduling the AGH services. The experimental results show that this multiagent approach provides a schedule that is of comparable quality as a centralized heuristic approach, and that by letting self-interested agents behave cooperatively, the overall schedule is significantly improved.