Retractable contract network for empowerment in workforce scheduling

This paper is about business modelling and negotiation protocol design in distributed scheduling, where individual agents have individual (potentially conflicting) interests. It is motivated by BT's workforce scheduling problem, in which multiple service providers have to serve multiple service buyers. The service providers and buyers all attempt to maximize their own utility. The overall problem is a multi-objective optimization problem; for example, one has to maximize completion rates and service quality and minimize travelling distances. Although the work is motivated by BT's business operations, the aim is to develop a general negotiation protocol for staff empowerment. Standard contract net is a practical strategy in distributed scheduling where agents may have conflicting objectives. In this paper, we have introduced a retractable contract net protocol, RECONNET, which supports hill-climbing in the space of schedules. It is built upon a job-release and compensation me...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: MAGS
• Authors: Edward P. K. Tsang, Timothy Gosling, Botond Virginas, Christos Voudouris, Gilbert Owusu, Wudong Liu
• Keywords: Buyers, MAGS 2008, Multiple Service, Workforce Scheduling Problem