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June 2003
Abstract:The subject of this thesis is the concept of market-oriented programming and market protocols. We want to solve an allocation problem where some resources are to be divided among a number of agents. Each agent has a utility function telling how much the current allocation is worth for it. The goal is to allocate the resources among the agents in a way that maximizes the sum of the utilities of all agents. To solve this problem we use the concept of markets to create mechanisms for computational implementation.
To achieve the advantages of market oriented programming, we have to consider the conceptual view of the problem a main design issue. We want to investigate the possibilities to build computationally effective mechanisms which maintain the intuitive, easy-to-understand structure of market-based approaches. In the first paper we look at two examples from the literature and show that conceptual improvements of the approaches will make agent behavior more realistic. This will also make the examples fit into a more general theory. In the second paper we create a market mechanism for handling combinatorial markets. The mechanism includes an auction, where each iteration runs in polynomial time. The mechanism shows good performance when the number of resources is relatively small compared to the number of agents.
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