A-Team Solving Distributed Resource-Constrained Multi-project Scheduling Problem

In this paper a multi-agent system based on the A-Team concept is proposed to solve the distributed resource-constrained multiproject scheduling problem (DRCMPSP). The DRCMPSP belongs to the class of the strongly NP-hard optimisation problems. In the DRCMPSP multiple distributed projects are considered, hence, a coordination of the shared decisions is needed as well as the local task schedule for each project. Multi-agent systems are the natural way of solving such problems. The proposed A-Team multi-agent system has been built using the JABAT environment where two types of the optimisation agents are involved: local and global. Local agents are used to find solutions for the local projects, and global agents are responsible for coordination of the local projects and hence, for the global solution. The approach has been tested experimentally using 140 benchmark problem instances from MPSPLIB with the average project delay (APD) as optimisation criterion.