This work describes the development and results on an agent architecture devoted to the planning and scheduling of passenger trips by using the contract-net protocol as base coordination mechanism. The architecture named MADARP, has been implemented over Jade, and provides a set of base agents that perform the basic interface, planning and support services, which can be extended to tackle specific passenger transport conditions and scenarios. In particular, this paper will focus on the planning agents, their coordination mechanism and its performance in a distributed scenario. The agent use allows easily adapting the architecture to different assigning and scheduling models. This work presents the results of a performance test, analyzing two different rates for the requests' arrivals under a distributed scenario with diverse number of hosts. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.