A MULTI-AGENT APPROACH TO MANAGING ADAPTIVE SERVICE SYSTEMS-PERLIMINARY EXPLORATIONS

Abstract

Service systems are abundant in our day to day lives. The establishment of a service system involves resource investment to provide the intended quality of service. When service resources are expensive and/or demand vary, it is desirable to have an adaptive service system that dynamically allocates resources to meet changing demands and evenly distributes loading to each service channel. In this paper, we present an approach to designing a service system such that task assignment is balanced in loading and resource utilization is adaptive to demands. The approach employs a multi-agent system with auction-based control and coordinated resource utilization adjustment. We chose world-wide-web serves as an application domain for the approach. We implemented the design in AWSA(Adaptice Web Server Agents) and analyzed its qualitative characteristics. The system is expected to provide efficient disk space utilization and balanced service quality with some overhand in data output rate.