A Multi-Agent Negotiation Strategy for Reducing the Flowtime

Task Bundle Delegation for Reducing the Flowtime

“…In Figure 5a, we observe that, while the quality of the solution reached by the strategy proposed in [2] is slightly lower than the one reached with the hill climbing algorithm, our strategy now reaches similar solutions. This is due to the fact that a socially rational reallocation according to the global flowtime can only decrease the flowtime, while it is not the case when the local flowtime is used.…”

“…Contrary to [2], we do not consider as socially rational the reallocations reducing the local flowtime (the completion time of jobs restricted to the nodes implied in the reallocation) which does not guarantee the convergence of the reallocation process, nor even the reallocations reducing the local flowtime and the makespan (the maximum workload of the agents). The reduction of the global flowtime guarantees the termination of the process.…”

“…To determine the offer bundle, we distinguish a strategy which selects a single task as in [2] and a strategy which selects several tasks.…”

“…The hypothesis we want to test are: (1) the flowtime reached by our strategy is close to the one reached by the classical approach and (2) the decentralization significantly reduces the scheduling time. Moreover, unlike our previous work [2] where we used the local flowtime and the makespan in our acceptability criterion, here, we only consider the global flowtime which is sufficient to ensure the negotiation process convergence. We also want to verify that the acceptability criterion allows to significantly improve the quality of the outcome.…”

“…We also want to verify that the acceptability criterion allows to significantly improve the quality of the outcome. Figures 5a and 5b respectively compare the flowtime and rescheduling time of our unary delegation strategy with the strategy presented in [2] and an hill climbing algorithm. These three algorithms start with the same random initial allocation.…”