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Analyzing the social behavior of Contract Net Protocol

  • Interaction and Coordination
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Agents Breaking Away (MAAMAW 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1038))

Abstract

Contract Net Protocol (CNP) assigns subtasks to agents which are involved in multiagent problem solving. Although the logical aspects of the negotiation protocol have been analyzed, the social behavior of protocol dynamics remain unclear.

This paper introduces a quantitative analysis of protocol dynamics, an essential for constructing continuous realtime applications. We perform an application independent simulation to analyze the social behavior of CNP. We obtain the following results: contractor utilization rate (contractor utility) increases together with the system load while the manager utilization rate (manager utility) decreases; when the number of agents increases, the contractor utility rises while the manager utility does not change; the uniformity of agents causes the concentration of “bids” and “awards,” and thus decreases the manager and the contractor utility.

Our simulation results are used to analyze the social behavior of Enterprise, a famous CNP application, and point out the inherent problem of Enterprise.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, 606-01, Kyoto, Japan

    Cheng Gu & Toru Ishida

Authors
  1. Cheng Gu
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  2. Toru Ishida
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Editor information

Walter Van de Velde John W. Perram

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gu, C., Ishida, T. (1996). Analyzing the social behavior of Contract Net Protocol. In: Van de Velde, W., Perram, J.W. (eds) Agents Breaking Away. MAAMAW 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1038. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0031850

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0031850

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60852-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49621-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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