This paper addresses a multi-agent scheduling problem with uniform parallel machines owned by a resource agent and competing jobs with dynamic arrival times that belong to different consumer agents. All agents are self-interested and rational with the aim of maximizing their own objectives, resulting in intense resource competition among consumer agents and strategic behaviors of unwillingness to disclose private information. Within the context, a centralized scheduling approach is unfeasible, and a decentralized approach is considered to deal with the targeted problem. This study aims to generate a stable and collaborative solution with high social welfare while simultaneously accommodating consumer agents' preferences under incomplete information. For this purpose, a dynamic iterative auction-based approach based on a decentralized decision-making procedure is developed. In the proposed approach, a dynamic auction procedure is established for dynamic jobs participating in a realtime auction, and a straightforward and easy-to-implement bidding strategy without price is presented to reduce the complexity of bid determination. In addition, an adaptive Hungarian algorithm is applied to solve the winner determination problem efficiently. A theoretical analysis is conducted to prove that the proposed approach is individually rational and that the myopic bidding strategy is a weakly dominant strategy for consumer agents submitting bids. Extensive computational experiments demonstrate that the developed approach achieves high-quality solutions and exhibits considerable stability on largescale problems with numerous consumer agents and jobs. A further multi-agent scheduling problem considering multiple resource agents will be studied in future work.

This paper focuses on the multi-agent parallel machines scheduling problem with consumer agents and resource agents. Within the context, all the agents are self-interested aiming at maximising their profits, and have private information, precluding the use of the centralised scheduling approaches that require complete information of all the consumer agents. Therefore, an iterative combinatorial auction mechanism based on a decentralised decision procedure is proposed to generate a collaborative scheduling scheme without violating information privacy. The developed approach adopts flexible bidding strategies to reduce the conflict in resource allocation, and a hybrid auction termination condition is developed to ensure the convergence of the approach while guaranteeing sufficient competition among agents. Experimental results show the developed approach generates high-quality solutions with a small price of anarchy compared with centralised approaches and outperforms the state-of-the-art decentralised scheduling approach in improving social welfare, especially for problems with a large number of consumer agents.