Collaborative Resource Planning with Distributed Agents

We study collaborative resource planning that arises when resource managers must coordinate their planning with internal or external customers. We envision a setting where geographically dispersed decision makers (agents) coordinate their resource planning using asynchronous, web-enabled mechanisms. We propose the design of such a mechanism where resource allocation is communicated in the form of schedules over which each agent involved has different preferences and financial incentives. Specifically, we design a “schedule selection game” where all participating agents state their preferences via a valuation scheme, and the mechanism selects a final schedule based on the collective input. We address the issue of incentive compatibility, recognizing that independent agents may not reveal their private information truthfully, and they may not behave in a way that is aligned with the overall system efficiency. Based on the principles of Vickrey-Groves-Clarke, we show that the proposed webbased mechanism is a direct revelation mechanism that implements the optimal resource allocation under agents’ dominant strategies. We analyze main properties of the mechanism such as budget balancedness and individual rationality. We illustrate the operation of the mechanism using a realworld example in coordinating electronics component manufacturing.