Publication - A Formal Study of Distributed Resource Allocation Strategies in Multi-Agent Systems

Authors: Shen, Jiaying; Adler, Micah; Lesser, Victor
Title: A Formal Study of Distributed Resource Allocation Strategies in Multi-Agent Systems
Abstract: In multi-agent systems, centralized optimal solutions are often impractical due to scalability and resource limitation issues which makes simpler distributed algorithms preferable. Unfortunately, there has been little work that formally studies different distributed systems to predict their performance or explain their behavior. In this work, we study three different distributed resource allocation strategies in a simple problem setting. We built a formal model that predicts the performance of different systems and verified the result through simulation. The performance of the distributed algorithms are compared to the centralized optimal solution. This work shows that it is possible to build a formal model for a distributed resource allocation problem. The simulation results shed some light on the advantages and disadvantages of a centralized solution and various distributed solutions.
Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Organizational Design, Simulation Environments
Date: January 2003
Sources: PS: http:/mas.cs.umass.edu/~jyshen/papers/ijcai03.ps
PDF: /Documents/ijcai03.pdf
Reference: Shen, Jiaying; Adler, Micah; Lesser, Victor. A Formal Study of Distributed Resource Allocation Strategies in Multi-Agent Systems. January 2003.
bibtex: 
@article{Shen-260,
  author    = "Jiaying Shen and Micah Adler and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{A Formal Study of Distributed Resource Allocation
               Strategies in Multi-Agent Systems}",
  month     = "January",
  year      = "2003",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/260",
}