A sequential game-based negotiation approach to distributed multi-project scheduling problem

It is the key to solve the distributed resource constrained multi-project scheduling problem by designing effective coordination mechanism to allocate global resources. Based on multi-agent system (MAS), the local scheduling model is established to optimize the project completion time. Initial local scheduling can be solved by the improved genetic algorithm based on forward-backward scheduling method. Given the different unit tardiness cost of each project, global coordination decision model is developed to optimize the multi-project total tardiness cost. Global resources are allocated reasonably after several rounds of sequential game-based negotiation and then the local scheduling of each project is modified. An instance and problem sets with different parameters are studied. The results show that: the proposed improved genetic algorithm based on forward-backward scheduling method has better problem scale adaptability and higher accuracy on solving the initial local scheduling problem; the stronger the global resources conflict, the more the multi-project delays and the greater the risk of project delay completion is; by comparing the results obtained by non-game distributed randomly coordination mechanism, it demonstrates that the sequential game-based negotiation approach can reduce the total tardiness cost for multi-project effectively.