Abstract
In this chapter the idea of Asynchronous Team (A-Team) is extended and used to solve one of the hard combinatorial optimization problems. The Team of A-Teams (TA-Teams) architecture for solving the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) is proposed and experimentally validated. The RCPSP belongs to the Non-deterministic Polynomial hard (NP-hard) problem class. To solve this problem a team of parallel cooperating A-Teams is proposed. Such terms consist of asynchronous agents, implemented using JADE based A-Team (JABAT) multiagent system. Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) is a popular framework dedicated to implement agent based systems. In the proposed TA-Teams from one to four A-Teams and four kinds of optimization agent have been implemented and used. Each optimization agent represents an optimization algorithm. The proposed optimization algorithms are based on several known metaheuristics, such as a simple local search, tabu search and path relinking as well as the crossover and special heuristics dedicated to solving the RCPSP. Computational experiment involved evaluation of the proposed approach in respect of the different parameters settings controlling the working and migration strategies used in the suggested TA-Teams approach.
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Jędrzejowicz, P., Ratajczak-Ropel, E. (2013). Teams of Agents for Solving the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem. In: Tweedale, J.W., Jain, L.C. (eds) Advanced Techniques for Knowledge Engineering and Innovative Applications. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 246. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-42017-7_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-42017-7_16
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