A Trust-based Negotiation Mechanism for Decentralized Economic Scheduling

This paper presents a decentralized negotiation protocol for cooperative economic scheduling in a supply chain environment. For this purpose we designed autonomous agents that maximize their profits by optimizing their local schedule and offer side payments to compensate other agents for lost profit or extra expense if cumulative profit is achievable. To further increase their income the agents have to apply a randomized local search heuristic to prevent the negotiation from stopping in locally optimal contracts. We show that the welfare could be increased by using a search strategy similar to Simulated Annealing. Unfortunately, a naïve application of this strategy makes the agents vulnerable to exploitation by untruthful partners. We develop and test a straightforward mechanism based on trust accounts to protect the agents against systematic exploitation. This "Trusted" Simulated Annealing mechanism fosters the agents to truthfully reveal their opportunity cost situation, which is used as the basis for the calculation of side payments.