Co-authored with Chan, H., Wei, K.
This paper describes a new generation scheduling paradigm, the Internet scheduling environment.It is formed by a group of Internet scheduling agents which share computational resources to solve scheduling problems in a distributed and collaborative manner.We propose a migration
scheme to transform existing standalone scheduling systems to Internet scheduling agents that can communicate with each other and solve problems beyond individual capabilities.T o coordinate computational resource collaboration among agents, we introduce the market-based control mechanism in which self-interested agents initiate or participate in auctions to sell or buy scheduling problems.Eff icient allocation of computational resources is achieved through the auctions.This paper also describes a prototype Internet scheduling environment named LekiNET, which is migrated from LEKIN®, a flexible job shop scheduling system.The experiments on the
LekiNET testbed demonstrate that the agent-based market-driven Internet scheduling environment is feasible and advantageous to future scheduling
research and development.
