Soft-Real Time, Cooperative Negotiation for Distributed Resource Allocation

Contents

In this paper we describe an approach to cooperative negotiation that uses a combination of techniques to allow our distributed resource allocation negotiation protocol to conform to soft real time constraints while obtaining reasonable solution quality. Amongst these techniques are the ability to resolve conflict in the allocation of resources on multiple levels, temporarily binding and incrementally improving the quality of the solution (a form of distributed hill climbing) given time constraints providing for an anytime characteristic, and restricting the context of negotiations to only use local information with extended meta-level information to generate and propose possible solutions to the problem. We describe the implementation of a simulator for the protocol and experimental results.