Publication - Modeling Task Allocation Using a Decision Theoretic Model

Authors: Abdallah, Sherief; Lesser, Victor
Title: Modeling Task Allocation Using a Decision Theoretic Model
Abstract: Mediation is the process of decomposing a task into subtasks, finding agents suitable for these subtasks and negotiating with agents to obtain commitments to execute these subtasks. This process involves several decisions to be made by a mediator including which tasks to mediate, when to interrupt the current task mediation to pursue a better task, etc. The main contribution of this work is integrating the different aspects of a mediator decision problem into one coherent and simple decision theoretic model. This model is then used to learn an optimal policy for a mediator. We propose a generalization of the original Semi-MDP (SMDP) model, which allows efficient representation of the mediator decision problem. Also the concurrent action model (CAM) is extended to allow better performing policies to be found. Experimental results are presented showing how our model outperforms the original SMDP and CAM models.
Keywords: Cooperative Negotiation, Learning, Multi-Agent Systems, Task Distribution, Uncertainty
Publication: Proceedings of Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 719 - 726
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Publisher: ACM Press
Date: 2005
Sources: PDF: /Documents/p399-abdallah.pdf
Reference: Abdallah, Sherief; Lesser, Victor. Modeling Task Allocation Using a Decision Theoretic Model. Proceedings of Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, ACM Press, pp. 719-726. 2005.
bibtex: 
@inproceedings{Abdallah-386,
  author    = "Sherief Abdallah and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{Modeling Task Allocation Using a Decision
               Theoretic Model}",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of Fourth International Joint
               Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent
               Systems",
  publisher = "ACM Press",
  pages     = "719-726",
  year      = "2005",
  address   = "Utrecht, Netherlands",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/386",
}