A Trust Mechanism for Decentralized Economic Scheduling

Abstract — This paper presents a decentralized negotiation pro-tocol for cooperative economic scheduling in a supply chain environment. For this purpose we designed autonomous agents, which maximize their profits by optimizing their local schedule and offer side payments to compensate other agents for lost profit or extra expense if a cumulative profit is achievable. To further increase their income the agents have to apply a randomized local search heuristic to prevent the negotiation from stopping in locally optimal contracts. We show that the welfare could be increased by using a Simulated Annealing like search strategy. Unfortunately, a naı̈ve application of this strategy makes the agents vulnerable to exploitation by untruthful partners. We develop and test a straightforward mechanism based on trust accounts to protect the agents against systematic exploitation. This “Trusted ” Simulated Annealing mechanism assures truthful revelation of the individual opportunity cost situation, as a basis for the calculation of side payments. I