Scheduling non-enforceable contracts among autonomous agents

With the emergence of fast and standardized communication infrastructures over which separately designed agents of different organizations can interact in real-time, there is an increasing demand for cooperation mechanisms that allow to carry out inter-organizational cooperations in a safe way. The lack of external control over an agent's decisions, resources and actions hamper the usage of traditional transaction and workflow technology to make self-interested agents cooperate, i.e., agents cannot not be forced from a mediating cooperation instance to continue a cooperation. The challenge is, therefore, to design a cooperation mechanism that motivates cooperating agents to carry out a specified contract and, in case of unilateral defection, ensures that none of the cooperators can benefit from the situation. In this paper we present a domain independent framework how non-enforceable cooperations can be made safe against unilateral defection. We have developed a utility-based scheduling algorithm that keeps a cooperation in equilibrium and that motivates agents to continue a cooperation as long as it is for all participants beneficial.