A Cooperative Savings Game Approach To A Time Sensitive Capacity Allocation And Scheduling Problem

We consider a competitive scheduling setting with arbitrary number of agents each having the option to utilize two parallel resources to satisfy its demand: (i) an in-house resource dedicated to process only the tasks of each specific agent, and (ii) a flexible resource capable of processing all agents' workloads. In a noncooperative setting, each agent would determine how much of its demand it will subcontract to the flexible resource with the objective to deliver its entire demand as quickly as possible subject to the priority rules set by the owner of the flexible resource (i.e., third-party). In this study, we also allow for agents to coalesce with other agents and update their initial subcontracting decisions to attain rescheduling savings. Evidently, a grand coalition of all agents can coordinate to achieve the maximum savings possible, but the resulting schedule may yield individual losses for a subset of agents (which we refer to as losers), thus necessitating a transfer payment scheme to distribute the rescheduling savings among the agents in an equitable way. We model the rescheduling interactions among the agents as a cooperative savings game, and propose savings distribution schemes that invoke the core allocation concept. [Submitted: November 22, 2011. Revised: March 31, 2012; June 2, 2012; June 21, 2012. Accepted: June 22, 2012.]