Abstract
An automated process was constructed which provides a platform for conducting analyses in general distributed multi-participant decision making environments, including the special case of FMS scheduling. The detailed example illustrates the use of the tool for analysing distributed decision making in a multi-machine, multi-task FMS setting. The example relates a controlled laboratory experiment using human ‘operators’ interacting in an electronic auction. The generality of our automated process supports this type of experimentation, as well as complex simulations using computerized expert systems as ‘participants’, simulations that enable us to perform detailed comparisons between the performance of the distributed process and existing centralized FMS scheduling heuristics.
