Internet scheduling environment with market-driven agents

This paper describes a new generation scheduling paradigm, the Internet scheduling environment. It is formed by a group of Internet scheduling agents which share computational resources to solve scheduling problems in a distributed and collaborative manner. We propose a migration scheme to transform existing standalone scheduling systems to Internet scheduling agents that can communicate with each other and solve problems beyond individual capabilities. To coordinate computational resource collaboration among agents, we introduce the market-based control mechanism in which self-interested agents initiate or participate in auctions to sell or buy scheduling problems. Efficient allocation of computational resources is achieved through the auctions. This paper also describes a prototype Internet scheduling environment named LekiNET, which is migrated from LEKIN®, a flexible job shop scheduling system. The experiments on the LekiNET testbed demonstrate that the agent-based market-driven Internet scheduling environment is feasible and advantageous to future scheduling research and development.