Showing papers on "Contract Net Protocol published in 2011"

A New Modified CNP for Autonomous Microgrid Operation Based on Multiagent System

Abstract: This paper presents a new modified Contract Net Protocol (CNP) for microgrid operation based on multiagent system. The CNP is a widely used protocol for interactions among distributed problem solving. The Contract Net Interaction Protocol of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA-CNIP) is a minor modification of the original CNP for multiagent system applications. In this paper, a modified CNP (MCNP) based on the FIPA-CNIP is proposed for more specialized interactions among agents for microgrid operation. A multiagent system is designed and constructed for microgrid operation. A microgrid operation based on the multiagent system is tested to check the functionality of the proposed MCNP.

Specifying and applying commitment-based business patterns

Abstract: Recent work in communications and business modeling emphasizes a commitment-based view of interaction. By abstracting away from implementation-level details, commitments can potentially enhance perspicuity during modeling and flexibility during enactment.We address the problem of creating commitment-based specifications that directly capture business requirements, yet apply in distributed settings. We encode important business patterns in terms of commitments and group them into methods to better capture business requirements.Our approach yields significant advantages over existing approaches: our patterns (1) respect agent autonomy; (2) capture business intuitions faithfully; and (3) can be enacted in real-life, distributed settings. We evaluate our contributions using the Extended Contract Net Protocol.

A Family of Heuristics for Agent-Based Cloud Bag-of-Tasks Scheduling

Abstract: The scheduling of bag-of-tasks applications (BoTs) in Clouds deal with fixed predefined allocation slots of Cloud resources, e.g., 1-hour time slots, that start being exhausted right after their allocation disregarding whether tasks are being executed or not. In addition, Cloud resources may be allocated for several hours to execute BoTs. However, some resource types (e.g., clusters) may be allocated for only a few hours, while others (e.g., CPU instances) may be allocated for several hours, so BoTs may be executed in such heterogeneous sets of Cloud resources (probably) allocated for a different number of hours. In this paper, a family of 15 scheduling heuristics consisting of two phases: (i) task ordering and (ii) task mapping (based on the remaining allocation times of Cloud resources) is proposed. The heuristics aim to maximize resource utilization while executing BoTs in heterogeneous sets of Cloud resources allocated for different numbers of hours. Cloud resources for executing BoTs are dynamically composed by adopting the contract net protocol. In addition, an agent-based testbed for Cloud BoT scheduling and execution was implemented. Simulation results show that the agents are capable of successfully and efficiently scheduling and executing BoTs in sets of Cloud resources composed from multiple Cloud environments.

Agent Dynamic Task Allocation Based on Improved Contract Net Protocol

Abstract: Aimed to dynamic task allocation problem in missile planning system,the formalization description and mathematic model about task allocation are studiedThe characteristic of dynamic task allocation is analyzedAn improved contract net algorithm about Agent dynamic task allocation problem is proposedThe algorithm settles the dynamic task allocation problem in uncertain opening environmentThe example shows the algorithm is effective

An Improved Contract Net Protocol with Multi-Agent for Reservoir Flood Control Dispatch

Abstract: Contract Net Protocol (CNP) has been widely used in solving the problems of multi-Agent cooperates and reservoir flood control optimization dispatch. This paper designs an Agent functional module based on the multi-Agent coordinated the construction of reservoir flood control optimization dispatch and the corresponding Agent to solve the problem of classical CNP in the Agent communication aspect, to enhance the efficiency of reservoir optimization dispatch and to improve the insufficiency of the classical CNP in the application of reservoir flood control dispatcher. Then, the capacity factor and the cooperation level are introduced in the module. Experiments are conducted on the Agentbuilder simulation platform to simulate reservoir flood control optimization dispatching with the improved CNP. The simulation results show the communication interactive efficiency and the performance of new protocol is superior to those of the classical CNP.

Agents for Cloud Resource Allocation: An Amazon EC2 Case Study

Abstract: Infrastructure-as-a-service consumers are presented with numerous Cloud providers with a wide variety of resources. However, consumers are faced with providers that may offer (even similar) resources at different hourly cost rates, and also that no single provider may have matching resource capabilities to fulfill a highly heterogeneous set of requirements. This work proposes an agent-based approach endowed with the well-known contract net protocol for allocating heterogeneous resources from multiple Cloud providers while selecting the most economical resources. The contributions of this paper are: (i) devising an agent-based architecture for resource allocation in multi-Cloud environments, and (ii) implementing the agent-based Cloud resource allocation mechanism in commercial Clouds using Amazon EC2 as a case study. The Amazon EC2 case study shows that agents can autonomously select and allocate heterogeneous resources from multiple Cloud providers while dynamically sampling resources’ allocation cost for selecting the most economical resources.

An Improved Contract Net Protocol Based on Concurrent Trading Mechanism

Abstract: This paper analyses the principle and problems of the classical contract net in the application, it is proposed that contract business extension contract nets based on the concurrent trading mechanism This mechanism makes the task allocation realize quickly It reduces network communication cost between the agents, improves the efficiency of multi-agent system collaboration and the overall system performance maximizly Finally, the simulation of aircraft ground deicing verifies the effectiveness of the mechanism

Efficient agent interaction in automation networks: A simulation study

Abstract: Multiagent systems (MAS) have widely been recognized as a suitable technology to develop robust, fault tolerant and reconfigurable control systems. However, practical applications, especially on the real-time manufacturing control level are currently limited by the lack of a sufficiently efficient yet unified agent architecture. As agent communication is one of the decisive factors for the overall performance of a MAS, this paper suggests an improved approach to service discovery and inter-agent negotiation, using the well known Contract Net protocol as an example. The approach eliminates the need for a central Directory Facilitator, reduces network load and enables timely decision making. The results are backed by a simulation based performance study.

A New Framework for Spectrum Sharing based on Multiagent Systems and Petri Nets

Abstract: Recently deployed wireless infrastructures follow static spectrum assignment policies, in which the spectrum is assigned to the licensed (or primary) users for long time durations. These static assignments create huge empty spectral resources which can be utilized dynamically. This dynamic access is not so obvious to perform and many related works have been done with their pros and cons. Therefore, this paper presents a cooperative framework trying to solve the cons of the existing approaches for dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radio networks, where the cognitive radio (or unlicensed) devices may use the currently unutilized spectrum dynamically and opportunistically. The proposed solution works on the principle of a multiagent system that allows the cooperation amongst several participating devices. The key aspect of our design is the deployment of agents on each of the primary and cognitive radio device that cooperates in order to have a better and dynamic use of the spectrum. For cooperation, contract net protocol is considered allowing spectrum to be dynamically allocated by having a series of messages exchange. Due to the concurrent, distributed and autonomous nature of our approach, Petri nets are adopted to model the behavior of cooperative framework. Based on Petri nets, we study the internal message passing and spectrum allocation mechanism between the participating primary and cognitive radio users and identify the information needed by the agents to make cooperative decisions. Then, using empirical results, we show that our approach achieves up to 80% of the whole utility within the span of few messages, and provides an effective mechanism for distributed spectrum allocation.

Research on Dynamic Rescheduling Program Base on Improved Contract Net Protocol

Abstract: Dynamic rescheduling of workshop production management, with the feature of combinatorial computation complexity, is an important and difficult research area, and be of significant importance for the dynamic scheduling problem. An improved Contract Net Protocol (CNP) with the global two-way, Multi-Agent System (MAS) based communication model, which incorporated the local autonomy of working mutually in consultation by negotiation, is presented in this paper. Furthermore, the simulation results in dynamic scheduling accompanying with its perturbation show that the proposed model and the algorithm are effective to the dynamic scheduling problem in manufacturing system.

A new dynamic contract net protocol

Abstract: CPN as object-oriented modeling tools, it is combined with undeniable agreement and trust of the update strategy, which is given a safe and intuitive model. When the given task managers are not only based on the cost of implementing the tasks in the tender selection of contractors, but a combination of trust, the implementation of utility computing tasks, whereby the decision does the task assigned. In the communication process, the introduction of repudiation protocol is collected by the participating parties and the preservation of evidence. Task is completed, and the use of trust updates the policy. If any party objects, he can submit evidence to the arbitrator and the appeal. Arbiter of evidence is based on two sides to give rewards and punishments on the trust arbitration. Effectiveness through the implementation of trust and assign tasks denied that an agreement ensures the fairness of assessment. Colored Petri nets are through the analysis tool, and the model is obtained with the activity and industry. Repast simulation tools are using the number of different tasks under the model simulation, and the analysis that is obtained the model has certain safety and efficiency.

Adaptive Contract Net Protocol Based on Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Abstract: An adaptive contract net protocol which can adapt to dynamic environment is proposed based on ant colony optimization algorithm. In the negotiation process of task allocation, the probability of the contractor being selected is related with the contractor’s credibility and ability. Several experiments are performed to show the advantages of this algorithm, it has a better decision quality when task recurrence rate (TRR) unchanged, and the communication traffic (CT) remains at a low level as TRR increases when the number of tasks (NT) unchanged. As a result, the algorithm can enhance the decision quality and reduce the communication traffic.

Experimental evaluation of service negotiation protocols in agent systems

Abstract: In this paper we provide experimental results concerning the impact of the negotiation protocol onto the quality of the negotiation outcome as well as onto the communication complexity of interactions incurred during one-to-many automated negotiations. We evaluate experimentally three negotiation protocols (Direct Task Assignment, Contract Net and Iterated Contract Net) with respect to two performance measures: negotiation outcome (i.e. utility) and communication complexity (i.e. number of exchanged messages) for different profiles of the contractor agents. We find that the Direct Task Assignment protocol delivers the worst average outcome, but at the same time it consumes the lowest number of messages. The Contract Net and Iterated Contract Net deliver much higher utility on average, while the Iterated Contract Net obtains the highest outcome for some configurations at the cost of the highest number of exchanged messages.

A Belief-Based Multi-Agent Markov Decision Process for Staff Management

Abstract: This paper presents a system designed for task allocation, staff management and decision support in a large enterprise, in which permanent staff and contractors work alongside under the overall management of a manager to handle tasks initiated by end-users. The process of allocating a new task to a worker is modeled under different situations, taking into account user requirements as well as the different goals of management, permanent staff and contractors. Their actions and strategies are formalized as autonomous decision-support subsystems inside a multi-agent system, based on Contract Net Protocol, belief theory, multiobjective optimization theory and Markov Decision Process.

Optimization for manufacturing system based on Pheromone

Abstract: A new optimization approach, called pheromone, which comes from the collective behavior of ant colonies for food foraging is proposed to optimize task allocation. These ants spread pheromone information and make global information available locally; thus, an ant agent only needs to observe its local environment in order to account for nonlocal concerns in its decisions. This approach has the capacity for task allocation model to automatically find efficient routing paths for processing orders and to reduce communication overhead, which exists in contract net protocol, in shop floor control system. An example confirms that a pheromone-based optimization approach has an excellent allocation performance in shop floor.

Conditional contract net protocol based distributed guide-weapon assignment algorithm

Abstract: Distributed guide weapon assignment(DGWA) is one of the cutting-edge problems in networked air defense missile systems(NADMS) research,aiming to allocate the most suitable guides to the weapons which are separately deployed,so as to maximize the effectiveness of NADMS.With description and analysis of DGWA in NADMS,a conditional contract net protocol based DGWA algorithm is proposed.Based on analysis of DGWA performing conditions,the framework of the algorithm is designed systemically.A stages announcement mechanism for auctioneers is presented,as well as an adaptive scheduling based bidding mechanism for bidders.The processes of DGWA in different performing conditions are simulated and analyzed through a typical scenario.Experimental results show that the algorithm is effective in NADMS.

Dynamic Scheduling Simulation and Optimization of Carrier Aircraft under Uncertainty

Abstract: Aiming at uncertainty and dynamic characteristic in scheduling of carrier aircraft,a dynamic scheduling simulation and optimization of carrier aircraft was developed based on multi-agent technique.The conceptual model for dynamic scheduling of carrier aircraft under uncertainty was established.The implicit function relationship of conceptual model among variable,objective and restriction conditions was described by multi-agent technique.An interactional coordinated mechanism among agents was proposed to reduce the influence of system disturbance(a sort of uncertainty,such as fault,new task arriving) which result in re-scheduling trouble.Through combination of contract net protocol and genetic algorithm,a hybrid optimization algorithm was developed to improve the problem solving capability of the dynamic scheduling model.Finally,a case about typical mission of carrier aircraft was given to improve the feasibility of simulation model and optimization algorithm.The capacity of the hybrid optimization algorithm was tested,and the influence of fault disturbance was analyzed by Sensitivity Analysis method.

Ant Colony Intelligence in Flexible Manufacturing Scheduling Using Contract-Net Model

Abstract: This paper builds an efficient agent-based flexible scheduling for real-world manufacturing systems. Considering the alternative processes and alternative machines, the allocation of manufacturing resources is achieved through negotiation among the job and machine agents in a multi-agent system (MAS). Ant Colony Intelligence (ACI) is proposed to be combined with Contract Net Protocol (CNP) so as to make agents adaptive to changing circumstances. ACI is integrated into both machine agents and job agents to solve the task allocation and sequencing problem. CNP is introduced to allow the agents to cooperate and coordinate their local schedules in order to find globally near-optimal robust schedules. The negotiation protocol is an interactive bidding mechanism based on the hybrid contract net protocol. The implementation of the issues using CNP model is discussed. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm integrated with ant-inspired coordination.

A TZBM-Based Algorithm for Flow Shop Scheduling Problem Considering the Decision Maker's Preference

Abstract: Nowadays steel manufacturing pays a critical attention to on-time delivery and inventory reduction. In our study, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the hybrid flow shop scheduling problem (HFSP) considering reducing total tardiness and inventory time. In order to achieve a feasible solution in limited computational time, the algorithm is based on Three-zone Buffer Management (TZBM) approach. TZBM approach combines the Drum Buffer Rope (DBR) method proposed in theory of constraints (TOC), with a contract net protocol in multi-agent system (MAS). The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is shown by simulation results comparing with the results obtained by a Tabu search (TS) algorithm. In the production field, a shipment buffer is set between the due date and the shipping time in order to avoid possible late shipment. The size of shipment buffer is always decided according to the experience of a system operator who has responsibility to draw up a production schedule. Wherein, an operator needs to take a decision considering trade-off between on-time delivery and inventory reduction. Therefore, a new interactive decision support system is proposed which is based on the two-stage TZBM approach. The operator needs to make his/her judgment whether an optimal solution shown by the system is preferable or not, then to change the trade-off between the two conflicting objectives. The system needs to compute another optimal solution according to judgment given by the operator. Under the result of numerical experiments, to integrate the experience of operators with the computational intelligence of systems proves to be an effective scheduling method.

An Energy Efficiency Task Allocation Method Based on Reasoning Model in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract: In this paper, a reasoning model is proposed for energy efficiency task allocation in wireless sensor network. The presented energy efficient contract net protocol is used to implement the negotiation process. Multi-issue scoring function can evaluate the offer with multi-issues in a quantifiable way. An energy threshold is brought to decrease communications which will turn out to decrease nodes’ energy consumption. And the usage of energy threshold also promote the nodes with high level energy have more chance to implement tasks. The simulation results show that the allocation model has outstanding performance maintaining a fair energy balance and is energy efficient in negotiation process.

Modeling of Energy-Saving Optimization Model by Sub-Sheet Dryness Coordination Based on Muti-Agent

Abstract: According to Multi-Agent network topology of the globe energy node in papermaking dryer section, the optimal algorithms of each part of sheet for energy consumption node Agent is designed through the mentality of designing. And multi-Agent contract net protocol is improved based on the gambling solution of mixed linear complementary problem. The overall steam saving optimization can be achieved by coordinated and local optimization and globe energy balance of each energy node for the four group of paper drying process.

An Extension to the Contract-Net Protocol Applied to the Transport Planning Problem of Oil Products

Abstract: In supply chains of petroleum industry, maintaining a proper inventory level for multiple petroleum products is a crucial issue. Basically, this chain has several elements like producer bases, consumer bases and terminals that are linked by means of a multi-modal transport network. These elements must cooperate to achieve the global goal of the system with a minimized cost. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a multiagent protocol for simultaneous negotiations based on the Contract-Net and the application of this in the chain aforementioned. As a result, this protocol proved to be very efficient to return a feasible solution in a low processing time.

Pheromone-based ant colony clustering algorithm in multi-agent cooperation

Abstract: Cooperation is a key issue of multi-agent system (MAS), pursuit problem as a test platform of multi-agent system and learning algorithm is widely used for testing the performance of cooperation, learning method and communication of MAS. To reduce the large computation of current pursuit methods such as the shortest distance first and contract net protocol, a method of applying pheromone-based ant colony clustering algorithm in multi-agent pursuit problem is proposed. Experiment results show that the proposed method can speed up the pursuit process compared with other algorithms, when increasing the number of predators the proposed method shows its superiority on efficiency and can be applied in multi-agent cooperation effectively.

Mercury: A Negotiation-Based Resource Management System for Grids

Abstract: In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a negotiation-based resource management system called Mercury. As the number of resources in Grids is increasing rapidly, selecting appropriate resources to execute tasks has become a crucial issue. The proposed system implements the Extended Contract Net Protocol (ECNP), which improves the standard bidding model by integrating a matchmaking technique. Our model addresses the issues of matchmaker overload and the lack of up-to-date resource state information in the original matchmaking model. To ensure that the system is user-friendly, we provide a web interface. By using the provided job templates, users can describe their jobs more easily, and service providers can deploy their services in the system in a simple manner. Furthermore, to improve the interoperability of the system, we adopt open standards, such as the WS-Agreement and JSDL protocols. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability and efficiency of the system.