A sealed bid auction-based two-stage approach for a decentralized multiproject scheduling problem with resource transfers

This study considers the transfer of shared resources among multiple geographically dispersed projects. To formulate this problem, we establish a two-stage decision-making model including the local decision-making stage and the global coordination decision-making stage and develop a two-stage approach (TA) to solve this model. In the local decision-making stage, each project agent (PA) uses a beetle antenna search algorithm (BASA) to generate an initial local schedule to minimize the completion time of each individual project. In the global coordination decision-making stage, a sealed bid auction-based approach with minimizing idle times scheme is developed to transfer the shared resources and to minimize the average delay of multiple projects. The performance of the proposed method is tested on a standard set of 140 problem instances. Computational experiments show that, compared with the branch and bound algorithm and two meta-heuristic algorithms, BASA can obtain high-quality solutions in all project instances. Compared to the existing algorithm for solving the decentralized multiproject scheduling problem with resource transfers, our proposed TA method can obtain lower average project delays and total project makespans on most problem subsets. These new, best results can be used as a benchmark for other methods for solving the same problem.