Scheduling Auction based Cooperation Game for shared resource scheduling and revenue distribution in a Cloud-based manufacturing environment

Abstract

In a cloud-based manufacturing (CM) environment, participating companies share their manufacturing resources. This paper proposes a matching mechanism between resource sellers and buyers in a CM environment. The target model of this study consists of multiple sellers, buyers, and a coordinator. The coordinator uses the scheduling auction-based cooperation game (SACG) to determine an efficient matching between sellers and buyers and a fair revenue distribution among the sellers. SACG consists of two stages: scheduling auction and revenue distribution. In the first stage, each seller submits information about when it can provide the facilities. A buyer makes multiple bids for different combinations of the release date, due date, and required usage time. In the second stage, SACG evaluates the contribution of the companies providing their resources by the Shapley Value. Since the proposed method determines the buyers’ payments with the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, it satisfies strategy-proofness for the buyers, but not necessarily for the sellers. However, computational experiments reveals that if sufficient number of sellers and buyers participate in CM, sellers are not rewarded by deceitfully raising their reserve prices.