Scheduling in a Virtual Enterprise in the Service Sector

The work described in this paper presents an approach on scheduling in a virtual enterprise in the tourism sector. This scheduling scenario has to reconcile customers’ and service providers’ interests. That is, the customer’s temporal constraints on when to consume the service, and the service provider’s preferences on when to accept a booking. An algorithm is being developed for this situation, that incorporates both sides’ interests by first taking the customers restrictions, and then finding the highest preferred solution for the service provider within these limits. This is not done in a setting of competing agents each solving his local problem [1], but in a single composite problem that is solved by the virtual enterprise using the algorithm presented in this paper. The research described in this paper is part of the MOVE (Management and Optimization of Business Processes in Virtual Enterprises) Project of the Electronic Commerce Competence Center in Austria, whose ultimate goal is to develop a reference implementation of a virtual enterprise in the tourism sector, where the field of tourism is just one scenario where we want to try and prove our ideas and findings for the more general field of virtual enterprises in the service sector.