Cooperative Scheduling Systems

Scheduling concerns about the effective allocation of limited resources over time. For the last two decades, many scheduling systems have been designed and developed for various applications in manufacturing, transportation and project management. As the complexity of the scheduling problem is getting more and more complicated, the development of scaleable and configurable systems become essential in many applications. With the advanced in information technology, the development of scheduling systems with high accessibility and wide distribution on the network or even on the Internet become feasible. The Internet scheduling systems can be further extended to the development of cooperative scheduling systems in a distributed environment. In this paper, we first describe the structure of the Internet scheduling systems that based on the client/server architecture. We can extend the design for the prototype Internet scheduling systems to construct the cooperative scheduling systems. The communication issue and the distributed problem solving for the cooperative scheduling systems will be presented in detail. The last section presents the implementation issues and future research directions concerning about the distributed production systems on the Internet.