Authors:
Antoine Nongaillard
and
Philippe Mathieu
Affiliation:
Université Lille 1, France
Keyword(s):
Multi-agent system, Resource allocation, Emergence, Negotiation, Network.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Bioinformatics
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Distributed Problem Solving
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Methodologies and Technologies
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Operational Research
;
Simulation
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Numerous applications can be formulated as an instance of resource allocation problems. Different kinds of solving techniques have been investigated, but the theoretical results cannot always be applied in practice due to inappropriate assumptions. Indeed, in these studies, agents are most of the time omniscient and/or have complete communication abilities. These hypotheses are not satisfied real life applications. practice. We propose in this paper a distributed mechanism leading to optimal solutions with respect to a more realistic environment. Agents only have limited perceptions and knowledge. Using local negotiations, they elaborate themselves optimal allocations, which can be viewed as emergent phenomena. We show that negotiations between individually rational agents lead to sub-optimal states in the society, and we propose a more suitable decision-making criterion, the sociability, leading to socially optimal solutions. Our method provides a sequence of transactions leading to
optimal allocations, according to any communication networks, when four different welfare objectives are considered.
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