Viet Dung Dang

Agent-based formation of virtual organisations

Virtual organisations (VOs) are composed of a number of individuals, departments or organisations each of which has a range of capabilities and resources at their disposal. These VOs are formed so that resources may be pooled and services combined with a view to exploiting a perceived market niche. However, in the modern commercial environment it is essential to respond rapidly to changes in the market to remain competitive. Thus, there is a need for robust, agile, flexible systems to support the process of VO management. Within the CONOISE (www.conoise.org) project, agent-based models and techniques are being developed for the automated formation and maintenance of virtual organisations. In this paper we focus on the former, namely how an effective VO may be formed rapidly for a specified purpose.

Generating Coalition Structures with Finite Bound from the Optimal Guarantees

The coalition formation process, in which a number of independent, autonomous agents come together to act as a collective, is an important form of interaction in multiagent systems. When effective, such coalitions can improve the performance of the individual agents and/or of the system as a whole. However, one of the main problems that hinders the wide spread adoption of coalition formation technologies is the computational complexity of coalition structure generation. That is, once a group of agents has been identified, how can it be partitioned in order tomaximise the social payoff? This problem has been shown to be NP-hard and even finding a sub-optimal solution requires searching an exponential number of solutions. Against this background, this paper reports on a novel anytime algorithm for coalition structure generation that produces solutions that are within a finite bound from the optimal. Our algorithm is benchmarked against Sandholm et al.ýs algorithm [8] (the only other known algorithm for this task that can also establish a worst-case bound from the optimal) and is shown to be up to 10^379 times faster (for systems containing 1000 agents) when small bounds from the optimal are desirable.

CONOISE: Agent-Based Formation of Virtual Organisations

Virtual organisations (VOs) are composed of a number of individuals, departments or organisations each of which has a range of capabilities and resources at their disposal. These VOs are formed so that resources may be pooled and services combined with a view to the exploitation of a perceived market niche. However, in the modern commercial environment it is essential to respond rapidly to changes in the market to remain competitive. Thus, there is a need for robust, flexible systems to support the process of VO management. Within the CONOISE (www.conoise.org) project, agent-based models and techniques are being developed for the automated formation and maintenance of virtual organisations. In this paper we focus on a critical element of VO management: how an effective VO may be formed rapidly for a specified purpose.