A multi-agent based approach for dynamic multi-project scheduling

Abstract

The earlier research in the area of multi-project scheduling is primarily focused on developing efficient priority rules for setting of due dates for new projects, resource allocation to the active projects, and activity scheduling. The priority rule-based heuristics suffer from the drawbacks of providing poor quality schedules and inflexibility. Recently, the artificial intelligence techniques such as multi-agent technology have been applied for scheduling the static multi-project problems. This paper proposes a multi-agent based framework to solve a distributed resource constrained dynamic multi-project scheduling problem. The architecture of the system is developed and the cooperative negotiation framework of various self-managing agents is described.