Cooperative Resource Allocation in Open Systems of Systems

Abstract

Resource allocation is a common problem in many technical systems. In multi-agent systems, the decentralized or regionalized solution of this problem usually requires the agents to cooperate due to their limited resources and knowledge. At the same time, if these systems are of large scale, scalability issues can be addressed by a self-organizing hierarchical system structure that enables problem decomposition and compartmentalization. In open systems, various uncertainties—introduced by the environment as well as the agents’ possibly self-interested or even malicious behavior—have to be taken into account to be able to allocate the resources according to the actual demand. In this article, we present a trust- and cooperation-based algorithm that solves a dynamic resource allocation problem in open systems of systems. To measure and deal with uncertainties imposed by the environment and the agents at runtime, the algorithm uses the social concept of trust. In a hierarchical setting, we additionally show how agents create constraint models by learning the capabilities of subordinate agents if these are not able or willing to disclose this information. Throughout the article, the creation of power plant schedules in decentralized autonomous power management systems serves as a running example.