Tamas Mahr

Auctions with Arbitrary Deals

To come to a deal, a bargaining process can sometimes take a long time. An auction may be a faster, but existing auction models cannot cope with situations where money is not an issue, or where it is difficult to express the utility of all participants in a monetary domain. We propose a modified Vickrey auction based only on preferences over the possible bids. This approach also allows for situations where a bid is not just a price or some fixed set of attributes, but can be any possible offer. We prove that in this flexible, generalized setting, the Vickrey mechanism is still incentive compatible and results in a Pareto-efficient solution.

Distributed agent platform for Advanced Logistics

The system that is demonstrated by live demo software through the internet is an agent platform developed for the DEAL (Distributed Engine for Advanced Logistics) project. It could be interesting for anyone developing agent platforms themselves, researching coordination techniques, or involved in logistical research. The demo appears in a single browser window as a Java applet that connects to the agent engine through the internet.

Using simulation to evaluate how multi-agent transportation planners cope with truck breakdowns

In most real-world settings, a transportation plan requires modifications during execution. A thorough evaluation of transportation planning methods thus requires testing and comparison in a dynamic environment. We give conditions on a simulation environment that follow from this requirement, and propose a multi-agent simulator meeting these conditions. In addition, we propose a new measure that captures robustness in such dynamic settings. The multi-agent simulator and the robustness measure are then used to compare three different transportation methods (two multi-agent planners and one online optimization approach) in settings with release time uncertainty and truck breakdown incidents.