Data-Submission Control of Web Service-Based Multi-Agent System
Chen Hou · IEEE Transactions on Services Computing · 2024
In a Web service-based multi-agent system (MAS), with the Web server collecting data from the agents periodically, the agents first submit their data to the Web server, and then, the Web server picks up the ones that match its demands on the quality of data (QoD) seems to be a practical way to arrive at the satisfactory data (SD). More data-submissions provide the Web server with more candidates to consider, increasing the probability of the Web server guaranteeing all the SDs, while causing more network traffic. Meanwhile, the heterogeneities of network traffic usage between different agents may lead to early network traffic exhaustion for some agents. Therefore, how to make the optimal tradeoff between network traffic and satisfaction with data (SWD) while balancing the network traffic arises as an interesting issue. To address this issue, this paper first formulates the QoD-evaluation model to classify the agents, then reveals the optimal probability for every agent to determine whether to submit the data to the server, and finally proposes an algorithm to make the optimal tradeoff. Theoretical results, simulations, and field experiments jointly verify its performance.