Authors:
Juan I. Cano
;
Luis Sánchez
;
David Camacho
;
Estrella Pulido
and
Eloy Anguiano
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Keyword(s):
Constraint-Satisfaction Problems, Simulation, Model-based agent optimization, Educational Resource Allocation, Multiagent Resource Allocation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
An instance of an Educational Resources Allocation (ERA) problem is the distribution of a set of students in different laboratories. This can be a complex and dynamic problem if non-quantitative considerations (i.e. how close the final allocation is to the student preferences or desires) are involved in the decision process. Traditionally, different approaches based on Constraint-Satisfaction techniques and Multi-agent negotiation have been applied to the general problem of Resource Allocation. This paper shows how a Multi-agent approach can be used to model and simulate the assignment of sets of students to several predefined laboratories, by using their preferences to guide the allocation process. This approach aims at finding new solutions that try to satisfy individual student needs with no knowledge about the general allocation problem. The paper shows some experimental results and a comparison, between a CSP-based solution modeled in CHOCO, a CSP Java-based library, and a Multi
-agent model implemented using MASON, a multi-agent simulation platform.
(More)