Schedule coordination through egalitarian recurrent multi-unit combinatorial auctions

摘要

When selfish industries are competing for limited shared resources, they need to coordinate their activities to handle possible conflicting situations. Moreover, this coordination should not affect the activities already planned by the industries, since this could have negative effects on their performance. Although agents may have buffers that allow them to delay the use of resources, these are of a finite capacity, and therefore cannot be used indiscriminately. Thus, we are faced with the problem of coordinating schedules that have already been generated by the agents. To address this task, we propose to use a recurrent auction mechanism to mediate between the agents. Through this auction mechanism, the agents can express their interest in using the resources, thus helping the scheduler to find the best distribution. We also introduce a priority mechanism to add fairness to the coordination process. The proposed coordination mechanism has been applied to a waste water treatment system scenario, where different industries need to discharge their waste. We have simulated the behavior of the system, and the results show that using our coordination mechanism the waste water treatment plant can successfully treat most of the discharges, while the production activity of the industries is almost not affected by it.