Bidding Protocol

The agent bids to the service agent the marginal utility it (would) receive from the server's service.
The server executes the service with the greatest aggregate demand.
Server informs the agents its servicing about this fact (if needed).

Since each change results in an increase on the global utility, this protocol is guaranteed to converge to a local optima.
- Tests on the challenge problem domain reveal that the local optima is almost always the global optima.
Problem:Step 1 requires the agent to know the state of all servers, and the servers must get bids from all agents. We need a lot of communications!

Jose M. Vidal - University of South Carolina

03 August 2000, 10:01PM