International Conference on Project Management and Scheduling, Date: 2012/04/01 - 2012/04/04, Location: Leuven

Publication date: 2012-04-01

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Project Management and Scheduling.

Author:

Wauters, Tony
Verbeeck, Katja ; De Causmaecker, Patrick ; Vanden Berghe, Greet

Keywords:

Multi-Project Scheduling, Dispersion Game, Learning Automata, ITEC, iMinds

Abstract:

The present paper demonstrates how decentralized multi-project scheduling problems can be solved efficiently by project manager agents playing a simple sequence learning game. The goal is to minimize the average project delay objective. Agents learn their activity list locally by using reinforcement learning. Meanwhile, they learn to find a suitable place in the overall sequence of all activity lists. All the projects need to choose a unique place in this sequence, while a mediator agent manages a simple dispersion game. It is shown that the sequence learning game approach is scalable and that it has a large effect on the average project delay and improves the best known results for all the MPSPLIB instances with about 25%.