Improvement to contract net protocol based on threshold and availability
Hong Chun-yu · Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems · 2009
To overcome the shortcomings such as low efficiency and large amounts of information in the process of using contract net protocol to solve the task allocation problem of large-scale multi-agent system,an improved scheme of contract net protocol based on bidding threshold and availability was proposed.Threshold was set to eliminate unnecessary biddings.And to determine the threshold,an approach was designed by maximizing the probability of participants receiving appropriate number of task authorization.Besides,a definition of availability applicable to all cases of participants' ability was also presented,which was introduced to the process of bids evaluation and comprehensive weighted with the quality of service,as a result,a new evaluation function for biddings was generated.And then,a formula to calculate the weight of availability was proposed based on the analyses of the total number of tasks and ability in the system.Finally,simulation experiments were conducted.The results showed that the performance of contract net protocol in large-scale multi-agent system could be enhanced remarkably by the improvement.