Authors
William E Walsh
Publication date
1998/12/3
Description
I present a decentralized market protocol for allocating and scheduling tasks among agents to form supply chains. The protocol resolves constraints arising from hierarchical subtask relationships and resource scarcity. Agents negotiate through auctions according to speci ed bidding policies, and the auctions in turn determine the allocations and prices of the tasks and resources. I describe some equilibrium, convergence, and optimality properties of the system. I propose to further analyze the convergence properties, analyze adaptivity and agent strategic behavior, and develop a model of task allocation for a concrete problem domain.