Generating Bids for Group-Related Actions in the Context of Prior Commitments

• Authors: Luke Hunsberger
• Venue: ATAL '01 Revised Papers from the 8th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents VIII
• Year: 2001

This paper addresses the problem of bid generation for a group decision-making mechanism based on a combinatorial auction in which agents bid on sets of tasks in a proposed group activity. It presents algorithms that an agent may use to generate temporal constraints for bids in such auctions. These constraints allow an agent making a bid to protect its private schedule of pre-existing commitments in case the bid is ultimately awarded. A task-integration-scheduling algorithm determines whether a new set of tasks can be merged into an agent's private schedule of pre-existing commitments. A temporal-constraint-generation algorithm generates the weakest set of temporal constraints (for inclusion in a bid) sufficient to protect the agent's modified schedule from any possible auction outcome. A proof of correctness for the temporal-constraint-generation algorithm is given. Both algorithms employ Simple Temporal Networks. Although the algorithms are presented in the context of a particular group decision-making mechanism, they have broader applicability to scenarios in which one agent makes an offer to other agents.