A winner determination algorithm for auction-based decentralized scheduling

This paper presents a formulation and an algorithm for the winner determination problem in auction-based decentralized scheduling. Without imposing a time line discretization, the proposed approach allows bidders to bid for the processing of a set of tasks under release time and due date constraints using an expressive bidding language designed for decentralized scheduling. The proposed winner determination algorithm uses a depth first branch and bound search. The search branches on bids and a constraint directed scheduling procedure is used at each node to verify the feasibility of the allocation. Experiments against a commercial optimization package, CPLEX 10.0, show that the proposed algorithm is more than an order of magnitude faster on average over a set of winner determination problems of decentralized scheduling generated based on a suite of job shop constraint satisfaction benchmark problems previously developed in the literature.