Multi-player game approach to scheduling problems

Scheduling problems involve the allocation of limited resources to competing consumers. In real-life scheduling problems, these consumers often have their own dissimilar objective functions. As current techniques aim to maximize some weighted sum performance metric, these dissimilar objectives are not properly taken into account. Ideally, such problems should be solved by having all parties negotiate for the resources in a fair manner, with an impartial arbiter to oversee proceedings. This paper investigates an approach that simulates this "negotiation table" method of scheduling by modeling the problem into a multi-player collaborative cum competitive game.