Local agent-based self-stabilisation in global resource utilisation

Distributed management of complex large-scale infrastructures, such as power distribution systems, is challenging. Sustainability of these systems can be achieved by enabling stabilisation in global resource utilisation. This paper proposes the Energy Plan Overlay Self-stabilisation system (EPOS), for this purpose. EPOS is an agent-based approach that performs self-stabilisation over a tree overlay, as an instance of a hierarchical virtual organisation. The global goal of stabilisation emerges through local knowledge, local decisions and local interactions among software agents organised in a tree. Two fitness functions are proposed to stabilise global resource utilisation. The first proactively keeps deviations minimised and the second reactively reverses deviations. Extensive experimentation reveals that EPOS outperforms a system that utilises resources in a greedy manner. Finally, this paper also investigates and evaluates factors that influence the effectiveness of EPOS.