When selfish industries are competing for limited shared resources, they need to coordinate their activities to handle possible
conflicting situations. Moreover, this coordination should not affect the activities already planned by the industries, since
this could have negative effects on their performance. Although agents may have buffers that allow them to delay the use of
resources, these are of a finite capacity, and therefore cannot be used indiscriminately. Thus, we are faced with the problem
of coordinating schedules that have already been generated by the agents. To address this task, we propose to use a recurrent
auction mechanism to mediate between the agents. Through this auction mechanism, the agents can express their interest in
using the resources, thus helping the scheduler to find the best distribution. We also introduce a priority mechanism to add
fairness to the coordination process. The proposed coordination mechanism has been applied to a waste water treatment system
scenario, where different industries need to discharge their waste. We have simulated the behavior of the system, and the
results show that using our coordination mechanism the waste water treatment plant can successfully treat most of the discharges,
while the production activity of the industries is almost not affected by it.
Keywords Auction mechanisms – Schedule coordination – Egalitarism