A multi-agent system for decentralized multi-project scheduling with resource transfers

The companies dealing with multiple projects are geographically distributed at different locations. These projects require local (always available to the concerned project) and global (shared among the projects) resources that are available in limited quantity. The global resources are generally required to be transferred physically among the projects, consuming significant amounts of both time and cost. The existing multi-agent systems for decentralized resource constrained multi-project scheduling problem (DRCMPSP) do not consider the resource transfer time and related cost for execution and control. We introduce DRCMPSP-RT that explicitly considers the transfer of shared global resources. This paper proposes a novel distributed multi-agent system using auctions based negotiation (DMAS/RIA) approach for the resource intervals and allocating multiple different types of shared resources amongst multiple competing projects.