Contract Net Protocol

About: Contract Net Protocol is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 606 publications have been published within this topic receiving 13729 citations.

Building agent-based systems in a discrete-event simulation environment

Abstract: The paper outlines a discrete-event simulation environment for modeling agent-based manufacturing systems. Exploiting the advantages of a general discrete-event simulation package, in the developed system agent-based features are directly included in the simulation environment providing the possibility to build agent-based models inside the simulation. The paper describes the agent-based functionalities of the system by presenting the communication mechanisms and predefined collaboration protocols. The modeling system implements the heterarchical control concept that is based on the contract net protocol.

Allocating goals and planning responsibility in dynamic sensible agent organizations

Abstract: A multi-agent system (MAS) can be viewed as a group of entities interacting to achieve individual or collective goals. Communication is a central issue in this interaction between agents. This paper uses the COOL language to define an extended version of the contract net protocol to address issues in one particular MAS-sensible agents. The proposed implementation of our protocol and its use in the sensible agent testbed is also discussed.

A method of distributed multi-satellite mission scheduling based on improved contract net protocol

Abstract: With the increasing number of earth observing satellites and the growing demand for remote sensing data, satellite mission scheduling is undergoing a change from the traditional off-line mode to on-line mode. To overcome difficulties in handling large quantities of satellites and large-scale scenes by the current on-line multi-satellite mission scheduling method, we establish the mathematical model, design the computation framework based on multi-agent system contract net protocol. Then we put forward a load reduction method based on mean shift clustering for satellite scheduling agent and a bid evaluation method based on genetic algorithm for central cooperating agent. Finally, Experimental results are used to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the algorithms.

Performance variation due to interference among a large number of self-interested agents

Abstract: The performance features of a massively multi-agent system (MMAS) when applying the contract net protocol (CNP) are examined. The recent growth in the volume of e-commerce on the Internet is increasing the opportunities for coordinated transactions by agents, concurrently occurring everywhere. Because of limited CPU and network resources, running many interactive tasks among agents can lower the quality or efficiency of MMASs. Although CNP is a widely used negotiation protocol that can allocate tasks and resources to appropriate agents, it is unclear how effectively CNP works in an MMAS where thousands of agents work together and interfere with each other. The performance of CNP in such an MMAS, especially the overall efficiency and the reliability of promised completion times, is investigated by using an MAS simulation environment. The results show that only manager- side control of CNP can improve performance in an MMAS.

An efficient service recommendation using differential evolutionary contract net for migrating workflows

Abstract: In a migrating workflow, agents transfer their code (specification) and their execution state to a site, negotiate services to be executed on their behalf, receive the results, and move on. The next place visited by agents, and the next service requested, is determined by both the goals of the workflow and the results of the current requests. However, the primary assumption in such workflow specifications is that the workflow designer has the ability of knowing the perfect knowledge of all the details of the process, and predicting changes of network configuration. In this paper, an efficient service recommendation strategy is suggested for migrating workflows. Services organization in our suggested strategy is based on the differential evolutionary contract net protocol. To evaluate the performance improvement achieved by our strategy, this paper uses F1 that is a well-known performance measure for recommender system. The results show that the new strategy can reduce the communication overhead and substantially improve performance in terms of global optimization and system utilization.