RESOURCE ALLOCATION PROBLEMS ON NETWORKS - Maximizing Social Welfare using an Agent-based Approach

Antoine Nongaillard, Philippe Mathieu

2011

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.

References

  1. Arrow, K., Sen, A., and Suzumura, K. (2002). Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, volume 1. Elsevier.
  2. Chevaleyre, Y., Endriss, U., and Maudet, N. (2010). Simple negotiation schemes for agents with simple preferences: Sufficiency, necessity and maximality. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 20(2):234259.
  3. de Weerdt, M., Zhang, Y., and Klos, T. (2007). Distributed task allocation in social networks. In AAMAS2007, pages 18.
  4. Doyle, J. (2004). Prospects for preferences. Computational Intelligence, 20(2):111136.
  5. Dunne, P., Wooldridge, M., and Laurence, M. (2005). The Complexity of Contract Negotiation. Artificial Intelligence, 164(1-2):2346.
  6. Nongaillard, A., Mathieu, P., and Jaumard, B. (2008). A multi-agent resource negotiation for the utilitarian social welfare. In ESAW2008, volume 5485 of LNAI. Springer.
  7. Sandholm, T. (1998). Contract Types for Satisficing Task Allocation: I Theoretical Results. In AAAI Spring Symposium: Satisficing Models, volume 99, pages 6875.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Nongaillard A. and Mathieu P. (2011). RESOURCE ALLOCATION PROBLEMS ON NETWORKS - Maximizing Social Welfare using an Agent-based Approach . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-8425-41-6, pages 206-211. DOI: 10.5220/0003159702060211


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart11,
author={Antoine Nongaillard and Philippe Mathieu},
title={RESOURCE ALLOCATION PROBLEMS ON NETWORKS - Maximizing Social Welfare using an Agent-based Approach},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2011},
pages={206-211},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003159702060211},
isbn={978-989-8425-41-6},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - RESOURCE ALLOCATION PROBLEMS ON NETWORKS - Maximizing Social Welfare using an Agent-based Approach
SN - 978-989-8425-41-6
AU - Nongaillard A.
AU - Mathieu P.
PY - 2011
SP - 206
EP - 211
DO - 10.5220/0003159702060211