Agent-Based Cooperative Scheduling

Contents

Cooperative scheduling is concerned with integrating multiple problem-solving perspectives or objectives when generating solutions to a scheduling problem. Cooperation may involve interactions between humans,, between scheduling agents, or between humans and agents. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the later two types of cooperation in which a team of software-based asynchronous agents play a major role in identifying candidate scheduling alternatives. This so-called ATeam architecture is at the heart of a set of decision-support tools that employ cooperative scheduling techniques for scheduling the operations of real-world paper manufacturing facilities. The IBM Paper Mill Scheduling System was developed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center over the past couple of years and is currently being sold world-wide.