Research on Degree of agent Availability in FIPA Contract Net Protocol
Song Hai · 2004
Based on one typical research work on FIPA Contract Net Protocol (CNP), which is named as Contract Net with Confirmation Protocol (CNCP), this paper focuses on the issue of the degree of agent availability(DoA) in CNCP. CNCP enabls the agents to make proposals or accept offers in a continuous time. But it also increases the risk of getting suboptimal deal or nothing for individual agent. By the concept of degree of availability, we revise the pro- posal-assessing mechanism of CNCP. The revision can effectively reduce the occurrence of forementioned risk, and may save many unnecessary computational costs with the idea of DoA.