Persuasion based on exchanging proposals for cooperative scheduling
Takayuki Itō, Toramatsu Shintani · Systems and Computers in Japan · 1999
Software agents, which can act autonomously and cooperatively in network environments on behalf of their users, are being actively investigated. Reaching a consensus is one of the most important activities of agents. The cooperation of the agents in creating a global schedule (a schedule being a vector of events), we call “cooperative scheduling.” In this article, we formalize cooperative scheduling as a bargaining problem in game theory, then we propose a persuasion method for solving the bargaining problem among agents. We propose a persuasion method based on exchanging proposals between agents. Namely, each agent receives the other's proposal in compensation for the other's acceptance of his own proposal. In our experiments, we use agenda scheduling as an example of cooperative scheduling and demonstrate the efficiency of the persuasion method proposed here. ©1999 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 30(7): 1–8, 1999