Combinatorial Auctions for Coordination and Control of Manufacturing MAS: Updating Prices Methods

We use the paradigm of multiagent systems to solve the Job Shop problem. It concerns the allocation of machines to operations of some production process over time periods and its goal is the optimization of one or several objectives. We propose a combinatorial auction mechanism to coordinate agents. The “items” to be sold are the time slots that we divide the time horizon into. In tasks scheduling problems tasks need a combination of time slots of multiple resources to do the operations. The use of auctions in which different valuations of interdependent items are considered (e.g. combinatorial auctions) is necessary. The auctioneer fixes prices comparing the demand over a time slot of a resource with the capacity of the resource in this time slot. Our objective is to find an updating price method for combinatorial auctions that meet the needings of scheduling manufacturing systems in dynamic environments, e.g. robustness, stability, adaptability, and efficient use of available resources.