A Market-Based Approach to Multi-Factory Scheduling

Abstract. In this paper, we report on the design of a novel market-based approach for de-centralised scheduling across multiple factories. Specifically, because of the limitations of scheduling in a centralised manner – which requires a center to have complete and perfect information for optimality and the truthful revelation of potentially commercially private preferences to that center – we advocate an informationally decentralised approach that is both agile and dynamic. In particular, this work adopts a market-based approach for decentralised scheduling by considering the different stakeholders representing different factories as self-interested, profit-motivated economic agents that trade resources for the scheduling of jobs. The overall schedule of these jobs is then an emergent behaviour of the strategic interaction of these trading agents bidding for resources in a market based on limited information and their own preferences. Using a simple (zero-intelligence) bidding strategy, we empirically demonstrate that our market-based approach achieves a lower bound efficiency of 84%. This represents a trade-off between a reasonable level of effi-ciency (compared to a centralised approach) and the desirable benefits of a decentralised solution.