Abstract
When multiple valid solutions are available to a problem, preferences can be used to indicate a choice. In a distributed system, such a preference-based solution can be produced autonomous agents cooperating together, but the attempt will lead to contention if the same resource is given preference by several user-agents. To resolve such contentions, this paper proposes a market-based payment scheme for selling and buying preferences by the contenders, in which the best solution is defined as the one where as many preferences as theoretically possible are globally met. After exploring the nature of preference, the paper develops a preference processing model based on the market based scheme, and presents a theoretical performance model to verify the correctness of the processing model. This verification is provided by a simulation study of the processing model.
For the simulation study, a manufacturing environment is conjectured, where a set of tasks are resolved into subtasks by coordinator agents, and then these subtasks are allocated to assembler agents through cooperation and negotiation, in which preferred resources are exchanged against payments. The study shows that our agent based strategy not only produces convergence on the total preference value for the whole system, but also reaches that final value irrespective of the initial orderof subtask allocation to the assemblers.
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Deen, S.M., Jayousi, R. A preference processing model for cooperative agents. J Intell Inf Syst 26, 115–147 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-006-8436-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-006-8436-1