Provisional Agreement Protocol for Global Transportation Scheduling

The global transportation scheduling problem is complex, decentralised, open and dynamic. It typically requires the services of many transport organizations to transport partial quantities along partial routes to fulfill a transportation task. We have applied agents to address this problem. The Provisional Agreement Protocol (PAP) was developed to facilitate the planning required in our transportation problem. A greedy PAP approach has been implemented for the complex global transportation problem, allowing partial quantity and route bids, and backtracking if an infeasible solution is encountered. In this paper, we present the PAP, together with some improvements over that which has been previously presented. Further implementation details and formal evaluation are provided. Our implementation allows a wider range of transportation problems to be solved than previous approaches.

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