A Trust- and Cooperation-Based Solution of a Dynamic Resource Allocation Problem

Resource allocation is a common problem in technical systems. For instance, the main task in power management systems is to maintain the balance between energy production and consumption at all times. If such a resource allocation problem has to be solved in a multi-agent system in a decentralized or regionalized manner, agents have to rely on cooperation due to their limited resources and knowledge. In open systems, various uncertainties - introduced by the environment as well as the agents' possibly self-interested or even malicious behavior - have to be taken into account to be able to allocate the resources according to the actual demand. Trust has been proposed as a concept to measure and deal with such uncertainties. In this paper, we present a trust- and cooperation-based algorithm that solves a dynamic resource allocation problem in open multi-agent systems. Throughout the paper, the problem of creating power plant schedules in decentralized autonomous power management systems serves as a running example to illustrate our algorithm and results.

[1]  Ramachandra Kota,et al.  Cooperatives of distributed energy resources for efficient virtual power plants , 2011, AAMAS.

[2]  E.F. Camacho,et al.  Applying Risk Management to Combined Heat and Power Plants , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.

[3]  Jiaming Li,et al.  COORDINATION OF DISTRIBUTED ENERGY RESOURCE AGENTS , 2010, Appl. Artif. Intell..

[4]  Sebastian Lehnhoff,et al.  Support vector machines for an efficient representation of voltage band constraints , 2011, 2011 2nd IEEE PES International Conference and Exhibition on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies.

[5]  Wolfgang Reif,et al.  Structuring and controlling distributed power sources by autonomous virtual power plants , 2010 .

[6]  R. Garduno-Ramirez,et al.  Multiobjective control of power plants using particle swarm optimization techniques , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion.

[7]  Reuven Bar-Yehuda,et al.  A unified approach to approximating resource allocation and scheduling , 2001, JACM.

[8]  Paul A. Pavlou,et al.  Evidence of the Effect of Trust Building Technology in Electronic Markets: Price Premiums and Buyer Behavior , 2002, MIS Q..

[9]  Alexander Artikis,et al.  Specifying norm-governed computational societies , 2009, TOCL.

[10]  Sarvapali D. Ramchurn,et al.  Trust-based mechanism design , 2004, Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2004. AAMAS 2004..

[11]  S.D.J. McArthur,et al.  Multi-Agent Systems for Power Engineering Applications—Part I: Concepts, Approaches, and Technical Challenges , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.

[12]  Michael Sonnenschein,et al.  On the Influence of Inter-Agent Variation on Multi-Agent Algorithms Solving a Dynamic Task Allocation Problem under Uncertainty , 2012, 2012 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems.

[13]  Sarvapali D. Ramchurn,et al.  Putting the 'smarts' into the smart grid , 2012, Commun. ACM.

[14]  Sarvapali D. Ramchurn,et al.  Trading agents for the smart electricity grid , 2010, AAMAS.

[15]  Wolfgang Reif,et al.  HiSPADA: Self-Organising Hierarchies for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems , 2013, ICAS 2013.

[16]  Alexander Artikis,et al.  The Axiomatisation of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organising Systems , 2011, 2011 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems.

[17]  Edward P. K. Tsang,et al.  Foundations of constraint satisfaction , 1993, Computation in cognitive science.

[18]  Jeremy V. Pitt,et al.  Reinventing Forgiveness: A Formal Investigation of Moral Facilitation , 2005, iTrust.

[19]  P. Klemperer.  What Really Matters in Auction Design , 2001 .

[20]  Wolfgang Reif,et al.  Trust-Based Scenarios - Predicting Future Agent Behavior in Open Self-organizing Systems , 2013, IWSOS.

[21]  Horst F. Wedde.  DEZENT -- A Cyber-Physical Approach for Providing Affordable Regenerative Electric Energy in the Near Future , 2012, 2012 38th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications.

[22]  Andrew B. Whinston,et al.  Building trust in the electronic market through an economic incentive mechanism , 1999, ICIS.

[23]  J. K. Kok,et al.  PowerMatcher: multiagent control in the electricity infrastructure , 2005, AAMAS '05.

[24]  Sebastian Lehnhoff,et al.  Evaluation of a Self-organizing Heuristic for Interdependent Distributed Search Spaces , 2013, ICAART.