A reconfigurable multiagent society for transportation scheduling and dynamic rescheduling

We have investigated the use of an agent-based system to automate the process of scheduling all the transportation assets for the U.S. military. For this problem, the creation of a fixed schedule based on static requirements is insufficient. Instead, we need to be able to maintain the schedule as a dynamic entity in the face of changing requirements, unreliable assets, and unexpected events during execution. Towards this end, we have focused on two main areas: dynamic rescheduling and dynamic load management. Dynamic rescheduling involves updating an existing schedule in response to changes in the scheduling resources and requirements, and is a special challenge in a multiagent environment. We discuss the approach we used to propagate and coordinate changes between the different agents. Dynamic load management includes the ability of the multiagent society to change its structure in response to changing computational requirements. We examine a set of techniques, including dynamic agent creation, to continually update the allocation of computational resources to the scheduling process.