Negotiation as a metaphor for distributed problem solving
Distributed Artificial Intelligence
Equilibratory Approach to Distributed Resource Allocation: Toward Coordinated Balancing
MAAMAW '92 Selected papers from the 4th European Workshop on on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, Artificial Social Systems
The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Coalition formation mechanism in multi-agent systems based on genetic algorithms
Applied Soft Computing
Methods for task allocation via agent coalition formation
Artificial Intelligence
Agent-mediated multi-step optimization for resource allocation in distributed sensor networks
The 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
Dynamic selection of negotiation protocol in multi-agent systems for disaster management
ICCCI'11 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Computational collective intelligence: technologies and applications - Volume Part II
On correctness and privacy in distributed mechanisms
AMEC'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce: designing Trading Agents and Mechanisms
How to price shared optimizations in the cloud
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
PRIMA'10 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems
Models of coalition formation among cooperative agents: The current state and prospects of research
Scientific and Technical Information Processing
Agent-based Cloud service composition
Applied Intelligence
Decomposing combinatorial auctions and set packing problems
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Tasks for agent-based negotiation teams: Analysis, review, and challenges
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Distributed reasoning for multiagent simple temporal problems
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Large-scale cooperative task distribution on peer-to-peer networks
Web Intelligence and Agent Systems
A comparative study between optimization and market-based approaches to multi-robot task allocation
Advances in Artificial Intelligence
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This paper presents a formalization of the bidding and awarding decision process that was left undefined in the original contract net task allocation protocol. This formalization is based on marginal cost calculations based on local agent criteria. In this way, agents having very different local criteria (based on their selfinterest) can interact to distribute tasks so that the network as a whole functions more effectively. In this model, both competitive and cooperative agents can interact. In addition, the contract net protocol is extended to allow for clustering of tasks, to deal with the possibility of a large number of announcement and bid messages and to effectively handle situations, in which new bidding and awarding is being done during the period when the results of previous bids are unknown. The protocol is verified by the TRACONET (TRAnsportation Cooperation' NET) system, where dispatch centers of different companies cooperate automatically in vehicle routing. The implementation is asynchronous and truly distributed, and it provides the agents extensive autonomy. The protocol is discussed in detail and test results with real data are presented.