Investigation of "Enhancing flexibility and robustness in multi-agent task scheduling"
This work addresses incremental improvements in scheduling robustness for multi-agent systems, focusing on reducing task delays.
The paper investigates flexibility distributions in multi-agent task scheduling, analyzing how different distributions affect the number of late tasks under delays, and proposes three new distributions that perform as well as or better than existing ones in certain scenarios.
Wilson et al. propose a measure of flexibility in project scheduling problems and propose several ways of distributing flexibility over tasks without overrunning the deadline. These schedules prove quite robust: delays of some tasks do not necessarily lead to delays of subsequent tasks. The number of tasks that finish late depends, among others, on the way of distributing flexibility. In this paper I study the different flexibility distributions proposed by Wilson et al. and the differences in number of violations (tasks that finish too late). I show one factor in the instances that causes differences in the number of violations, as well as two properties of the flexibility distribution that cause them to behave differently. Based on these findings, I propose three new flexibility distributions. Depending on the nature of the delays, these new flexibility distributions perform as good as or better than the distributions by Wilson et al.