Stable multi-project scheduling of airport ground handling services by heterogeneous agents

This paper addresses decentralized multi-project scheduling under uncertainty. The problem instance we study is the scheduling of airport ground handling services, where aircraft turnarounds can be seen as multiple projects, ground handling services as activities, and service providers as resources. In this environment aircraft requiring ground handling services and the corresponding service providers are self-interested autonomous parties. Moreover, the environment is well-known for its large number of disturbances. We employ a heterogeneous multiagent scheduling framework with two types of autonomous agents representing aircraft and ground service providers respectively. We use online scheduling to cope with uncertainty in the release time of project: the uncertainty in aircraft arrival time at an airport. To balance the interests of the two types of agents in this heterogeneous multiagent system, we propose a marketbased mechanism to assign time slots to aircraft turnaround activit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Xiaoyu Mao, Nico Roos, Alfons H. Salden
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ATAL 2009, Ground Handling Services, Service Providers, Slack Times