Dynamic scheduling of ready mixed concrete delivery problem using delegate MAS

Abstract

Delegate MAS is a bio-inspired coordination mechanism that is geared at large-scale and dynamic applications. It is used for coordination and control applications, such as decentralized management of traffic and logistics. While using Delegate MAS, agents behave selfishly and try to maximize their own utility. It is unclear that with such selfish behaviour, complex and constrained scheduling problem can also be solved. In these problems, coping with dynamism in stressful scenarios is very challenging. In this paper, we present our experience of using Delegate MAS for a constrained problem. As a case study, we use dynamic ready mixed concrete delivery problem. We characterized input scenarios of our case study into unique attributes. By empirical evaluation, we have found that using Delegate MAS as coordination mechanism results in consistent performance when scale and stress of the problem is increased. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.