Resource allocation is a common problem in many technical systems. In multi-agent systems, the decentralized or regionalized solution of this problem usually requires the agents to cooperate due to their limited resources and knowledge. At the same time, if these systems are of large scale, scalability issues can be addressed by a self-organizing hierarchical system structure that enables problem decomposition and compartmentalization. In open systems, various uncertainties-introduced by the environment as well as the agents' possibly self-interested or even malicious behavior-have to be taken into account to be able to allocate the resources according to the actual demand.In this article, we present a trust-and cooperation-based algorithm that solves a dynamic resource allocation problem in open systems of systems. To measure and deal with uncertainties imposed by the environment and the agents at runtime, the algorithm uses the social concept of trust. In a hierarchical setting, we additionally show how agents create constraint models by learning the capabilities of subordinate agents if these are not able or willing to disclose this information. Throughout the article, the creation of power plant schedules in decentralized autonomous power management systems serves as a running example.
Mobile robot systems usually are designed, built, and programmed for dedicated use cases. Consequently, especially for unmanned aerial vehicles diverse applications result in very heterogeneously designed robots. To overcome this need for specialization, we propose to dynamically adapt the robots' capabilities at run-time. This is done by connecting and disconnecting hardware modules providing those capabilities, i.e., re-allocating resources within the robot ensemble. Thereby, no longer individualized robots have to be designed for different tasks. Instead, the system is enabled to adapt its hardware configuration to changing requirements. For calculating necessary adaptations, i.e., solving the resource allocation problem, we propose a heuristic, marketbased approach that exploits the possibility to decompose the resource allocation problem and distributively finds a solution. We show that our approach outperforms a centralized one especially when increasing the problem size in terms of agents, tasks, and relevant capabilities while providing the same quality.
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