Agent-based scheduling for aircraft deicing

Abstract

The planning and scheduling of the deicing and anti-icing activities is an important and challenging part of airport departure planning. Deicing planning has to be done in a highly dynamic environment involving several autonomous and self-interested parties. Traditional centralized scheduling approaches do not acknowledge the autonomy of parties involved. We therefore propose an agent-based scheduling approach for solving the aircraft deicing problem where stakeholders are modelled as autonomous agents. Based on our view that multi-agent scheduling is scheduling combined with agent coordination, we propose a simple first come, first served heuristic combined with the concept of decommitment penalties. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach through a series of experiments.