A Winner Determination Algorithm for Auction-Based Decentralized Scheduling Chun Wang Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Western Ontario
Thompson Engineering Building Room 279, London, Ontario, Canada
N6A5B9 +1 519 6612111-80334, +1 519 6612111-88262 Hamada H. Ghenniwa Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Western Ontario
Thompson Engineering Building Room 279, London, Ontario, Canada
N6A5B9 +1 519 6612111-80334, +1 519 6612111-88262 Weiming Shen Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute, National Research Council Canada
800 Collip Circle, London, Ontario, Canada N6G4X8 Tel: +1 519 4307134 ABSTRACT

This paper presents a formulation and an algorithm for the winner determination problem in auction-based decentralized scheduling. Without imposing a time line discretization, the proposed approach allows bidders to bid for the processing of a set of tasks under release time and due date constraints using an expressive bidding language designed for decentralized scheduling. The proposed winner determination algorithm uses a depth first branch and bound search. The search branches on bids and a constraint directed scheduling procedure is used at each node to verify the feasibility of the allocation. Experiments against a commercial optimization package, CPLEX 10.0, show that the proposed algorithm is more than an order of magnitude faster on average over a set of winner determination problems of decentralized scheduling generated based on a suite of job shop constraint satisfaction benchmark problems previously developed in the literature.

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