Planning under Uncertainty for Coordinating Infrastructural Maintenance (abstract)

Planning under Uncertainty for Coordinating Infrastructural Maintenance (abstract)

Scharpff, J.C.D.
Spaan, M.T.J.
Volker, L.
De Weerdt, M.M.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Computer Technology

2013-11-07

Scheduling of infrastructural maintenance poses a complex multi-agent problem. Commonly a central authority is responsible for the quality and throughput of the infrastructure, while the actual maintenance is performed by multiple self-interested contractors. Not only does the central authority have to (economically) incentivise agents to consider quality and throughput, it is also burdened with the coordination of agents’ activities on the network with contingent activity durations. We introduce a coordination method that combines planning under uncertainty and dynamic mechanism design to coordinate agents on a network level. We apply this method on maintenance planning scenarios obtained through accurate modelling of the problem domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of dynamic mechanism design on a real-world problem. Finally, we validate the feasibility of our method through experimental evaluation and identify current open challenges for both the planning and scheduling as well as the mechanism design communities.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c88117e3-68e5-4569-8c8a-4473b6b0995d

BNAIC 2013: 25th Belgium-Netherlands Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Delft, The Netherlands, 7-8 November 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 The Author(s)