Assignment Problem in Requirements Driven Agent Collaboration and its Implementation

Requirements Driven Agent Collaboration (RDAC) is a mechanism where the self-interested service agents actively andautonomously search for the required services submitted bythe request agents and compete to offer the services. Thismechanism would be more suitable for large number of autonomous service providers on internet compared with thecurrent service-oriented computing framework. Collaboration is an important issue in this mechanism. This paper focuses on the collaboration issue in RDAC. First, we define the assignment problem in RDAC and showthat it is NP-complete. Then, we model it as a Kripke structure with normative systems on it. This makes it possibleto bridge the assignment problem and the existing effortsin normative systems, games, mechanisms, etc. Thirdly, anegotiation-based approach is given to solve the problemand the performance of the negotiation is evaluated by simulation. Finally, a tool for RDAC has been implemented toput it into practice and for further testing and evaluation.

Authors

• Jian Tang Midea Group
• Zhi Jin School of Computer Science, Peking University MoE Key Lab. of High Confidence Software Technologies(PKU), China

Keywords

• Task Allocation
• Normative Systems
• Negotiation