Communication infrastructure in distributed scheduling

Abstract

The emergence of distributed artificial intelligent (DAI) introduced a new approach to solve scheduling problems by a set of scheduling systems that interact with each other in the problem-solving process. In this paper, we describe a communication infrastructure to handle connection and communication between distributed Internet scheduling systems for distributed applications. First, we present an agent model of distributed scheduling systems where agents can communicate and coordinate activities with each other via an agent communication language. Then, we define the syntax and semantics for the agent communication languages, and negotiation mechanism. Following that, we discuss the design and development of the prototype for the multi-agent scheduling systems. We conclude with a discussion of communication issues for heterogeneous agent-based scheduling systems to solve distributed scheduling problems. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.