Coalition Formation and Combinatorial Auctions; Applications to Self-organization and Self-management in Utility Computing

In this paper we propose a two-stage protocol for resource management in a hierarchically organized cloud. The first stage exploits spatial locality for the formation of coalitions of supply agents; the second stage, a combinatorial auction, is based on a modified proxy-based clock algorithm and has two phases, a clock phase and a proxy phase. The clock phase supports price discovery; in the second phase a proxy conducts multiple rounds of a combinatorial auction for the package of services requested by each client. The protocol strikes a balance between low-cost services for cloud clients and a decent profit for the service providers. We also report the results of an empirical investigation of the combinatorial auction stage of the protocol.Comment: 14 page

Suitable task allocation in intelligent systems for assistive environments

The growing need of technological assistance to provide support to people with special needs demands for systems more and more efficient and with better performances. With this aim, this work tries to advance in a multirobot platform that allows the coordinated control of different agents and other elements in the environment to achieve an autonomous behavior based on the user’s needs or will. Therefore, this environment is structured according to the potentiality of each agent and elements of this environment and of the dynamic context, to generate the adequate actuation plans and the coordination of their execution.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Distributed Agent-Based Online Auction System

This paper concerns the design and development of a distributed agent-based online system for English auctions. The proposed system is composed of two parts: an Agent-based Auction Server and a Web-based Graphical User Interface. The first part of our work brought about the advantages introduced by the multi-agent systems technology to the high-level of abstraction, modularity and performance of the server architecture and its implementation. On the server side, bids submitted by auction participants are handled by a hierarchical organization of agents that can be efficiently distributed on a computer network. This approach avoids the bottlenecks of bid processing that might occur during periods of heavy bidding, like for example snipping. We present experimental results that show a significant improvement of the server throughput compared with the architecture where a single auction manager agent is used for coordinating the participants for each active auction that is registered with the server. The second part of our work involved analysis of external functionalities, implementation and usability of a prototype online auction system that incorporates the Agent-based Auction Server. Our solution is outlined in terms of information flow management and its relation to the functionalities of the system. The main outcome of this part of the work is a clean specification of the information exchanges between the agent and non-agent software components of the system. Special attention is also given to the interoperability, understood here as successful integration of the different data communication protocols and software technologies that we employed for the implementation of the system

Automated Bidding in Computing Service Markets. Strategies, Architectures, Protocols

This dissertation contributes to the research on Computational Mechanism Design by providing novel theoretical and software models - a novel bidding strategy called Q-Strategy, which automates bidding processes in imperfect information markets, a software framework for realizing agents and bidding strategies called BidGenerator and a communication protocol called MX/CS, for expressing and exchanging economic and technical information in a market-based scheduling system