An auction based negotiation protocol for resource allocation in customized housing construction

Scheduling has long been a challenge to housing construction industry. It is critical to find a dynamic resource allocation mechanism that can fit into the intrinsically distributed subcontracting project and react to highly dynamic real-time event from construction site. An agent based scheduling mechanism is proposed at operation level to address the distributed decision making structure in housing construction context. An auction based negotiation protocol is presented to facilitate coordination among distributed scheduling agents. The proposed mechanism has been evaluated favorably in terms of load balancing and resource utilization under dynamically changing environment. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.