The agents know their own state of affairs only, consider their schedule variants as branching futures, and communicate under a simple and reasonable set of market rules. These rules of the game define a negotiation process and say, among other things, that each agent has to make decisions that are rational, at least, in a local way. Coalitions may not be formed. Collective responsibility, eg, in the case of lateness of jobs in progress due to the machines preferring new, more promising jobs, is inspired by a penalty mechanism. At the present, rather early stage of work we are making systematic experiments. The ways of comparing our results with those of some other approaches are far from being obvious, since there is an unusual flexibility allowed in our model. However, we deem that just these features could make our approach a practical one if applied in an actual manufacturing environment. Up to now, above research has not belonged to any kind of concerted action; we are open to participate with it in some form of joint research.
