loading...
 This Article 
   
 Share 
   
 Bibliographic References 
   
 Add to: 
 
Digg
Furl
Spurl
Blink
Simpy
Google
Del.icio.us
Y!MyWeb
 
 Search 
   
20th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'00)
Contract Type Sequencing for Reallocative Negotiation
Taipei, Taiwan
April 10-April 13
ISBN: 0-7695-0601-1
Martin Andersson, Washington University
Tuomas Sandholm, Washington University
The capability to reallocate items (e.g. tasks, securities, bandwidth slices, Mega Watt hours of electricity, and collectibles) is a key feature in automated negotiation. Especially when agents have preferences over combinations of items, this is highly nontrivial. Marginal cost based reallocation leads to an anytime algorithm where every agent's utility increases monotonically over time. Different contract types head toward different locally optimal task allocations, and contracts from a recently introduced comprehensive contract type, OCSM-contracts, head toward the global optimum. Reaching it can take impractically long, so it is important to trade off solution quality against negotiation time.To construct negotiation protocols that lead to the best achievable allocations in a bounded amount of time, we compared sequences of four contract types: original, cluster, swap, and multiagent contracts. The experiments show that it is profitable to use multiple contract types in the sequence: significantly, better solutions are reached, and faster, than if only one contract type is used. However, the best sequences only include original and cluster contracts. Swap and multiagent contracts lead to bad local optima quickly. Interestingly, the number of contracts using any given contract, type does not always decrease over time: contracts play the role of enabling further contracts.
Citation:
Martin Andersson, Tuomas Sandholm, "Contract Type Sequencing for Reallocative Negotiation," icdcs, pp.154, 20th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'00), 2000
Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use.