Nash equilibrium solutions in multi-agent project scheduling with milestones

This paper addresses a project scheduling environment in which the activities are partitioned among set of agents. The owner is interested completing as soon possible. Therefore, she/he defines rewards and penalties to stimulate agents complete faster. offers per-day reward for early completion intermediate milestones be met within specific due dates, with associated penalties. Each agent can, therefore, decide duration her/his activities, taking into account linear activity crashing costs, completion, penalty arising from violating milestone due-dates. We consider Nash equilibria, i.e., situations no has an interest individually changing any particular, problem finding minimum-makespan equilibrium. known NP-hard, this paper, we (i) propose new efficient exact algorithmic approach equilibrium (ii) through extensive computational campaign evaluate role played by driving towards owner’s goal.