This thesis describes a new generation scheduling paradigm, the Internet Scheduling Environment. It is formed by a group of Internet scheduling agents, which share computational resources to solve scheduling problems in a distributed and collaborative manner. This thesis proposes a migration scheme that transforms existing standalone scheduling systems to Internet scheduling agents. In this way, standalone systems can communicate with each other and solve problems that are originally beyond individual capabilities. To control and coordinate computational resource sharing among agents, this thesis further endows the Internet Scheduling Environment with market mechanisms, in which self-interested agents initiate or participate in auctions to sell or buy scheduling problems, meanwhile glo...[ Read more ]

This thesis describes a new generation scheduling paradigm, the Internet Scheduling Environment. It is formed by a group of Internet scheduling agents, which share computational resources to solve scheduling problems in a distributed and collaborative manner. This thesis proposes a migration scheme that transforms existing standalone scheduling systems to Internet scheduling agents. In this way, standalone systems can communicate with each other and solve problems that are originally beyond individual capabilities. To control and coordinate computational resource sharing among agents, this thesis further endows the Internet Scheduling Environment with market mechanisms, in which self-interested agents initiate or participate in auctions to sell or buy scheduling problems, meanwhile globally efficient allocation of computational resources is achieved.

This thesis also describes LekiNET, a prototype Internet Scheduling Environment, which is migrated from LEKIN[registered trade mark4:53 PM 1/28/02], a flexible job shop scheduling system. The LekiNET is implemented in the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), a programming paradigm that enables interoperability among distributed applications. The construction of the LekiNET testbed and the preliminary experiments demonstrate that the agent-based market-driven Internet Scheduling Environment is feasible and advantageous to future scheduling research and development.