MACE: A Multi-attribute Combinatorial Exchange

Abstract

The increasing interconnection between computers has created a vision for Grids. Within these Grids, computing resources such as processing power, storage space or applications are accessible to any participant. This accessibility has major ramifications for organizations since they can reduce costs by outsourcing nonessential elements of their IT infrastructure to various forms of service providers. Such emerging e-Utilities -providers offering on-demand access to computing resources -enable organizations to perform computational jobs spontaneously through other resources in the Grid that are not under the control of the (temporary) user (Foster et al., 2002).With the implementation of Grid middleware, institutional arrangements are becoming increasingly important. In essence, current Grid middleware provides insufficient incentive to participate in the Grid. In this context, the application of markets for the Grid is considered to work well. By assigning a value (also called utility) to their service requests, users can reveal their relative urgency or costs to the service, which is subject to service usage constraints. If the market mechanism is properly defined, users may be provided incentives to express their true values for service requests and offers. This in turn marks the prerequisite for attaining an efficient allocation of services, which maximizes the sum of aggregate valuations (Schnizler et al., 2005).MACE -a multi-attribute combinatorial exchange -is a suitable auction mechanism for allocating and scheduling resources in the Grid (Schnizler et al., 2006). In contrast to other approaches, the proposed mechanism accounts for the variety of services by incorporating 1 Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings 06461 Negotiation and Market Engineering

A comparison study of multi-attribute continuous double auction mechanisms

“…If the agent prefers offer O over O', then O has a higher utility than O. If U(O) = U(O'), the agent is indifferent between the offers (Schnizler, 2008).…”

“…The properties required for an auction are as follows (Gimpel & Makio, 2006;Weiss 1999;Schnizler, 2008): Budget-balance: This property guarantees the amount of money entering the auction (by participants) equals the amount exiting it (to participants). In a weak budget-balance mechanism, the sum of the entering and exiting money must be non-negative; that means the auction will not run at a loss.…”

Combinatorial Auction-Based Marketplace Mechanism for Cloud Service Reservation

“…The winner determination problem is solved by an external general-purpose solver, which can be CPLEX [51] or lp solve [52]. The overall architecture is designed after U-Mart [35] and the auction mechanism is built using MACE framework [53].…”

On the Simulation of Grid Market Coordination Approaches

“…Instead, a multi-attribute combinatorial exchange (MACE) is applied that satisfies the described requirements [30].…”