Distributed Scheduling

Our research in Distributed Scheduling has evolved along the following lines:

    • OPIS: The OPIS system takes a first step towards distributed scheduling by using multiple knowledge sources (a la Blackboard architectures) to represent different perspectives (e.g., order, resource) to schedule activities.
    • CORTES:
    • The CORTES system took a different approach to distributed scheduling. Building on the

Constrained Heuristic Search

    paradigm, it partitions orders to be scheduled among a set of scheduling agents. Each agent is responsible for one or more orders, and each agent controls a set of resources. Orders being scheduled by one agent may require resources from another. Texture measures are used as a means of communicating resource demand information among agents.

See Sycara, K., Roth, S., Sadeh, N., and Fox, M.S., (1991), “Distributed Constrained Heuristic Search”, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Vol. 21, No. 6, pp. 1446-1461, for more details.