A bid & auction mechanism for resource management in project portfolios

This paper develops a bid & auction mechanism to help decision making in project portfolio management, either to allocate global resources, or to decide whether a new project should be accepted or not. This mechanism is developed based ona multi-agent system model which is inherently a bi-level structure. In the upper level, an auction agent is employed to represent the benefit of the portfolio through allocating global resources. In the lower level, project agents are employed to represent the benefit of corresponding projects (or programs) through managing specific schedules. Moreover, cash is employed as the bid target here to ensure the truthfulness of information.