An efficient resource allocation approach in real-time stochastic environment

Abstract

We are interested in contributing to solving effectively a particular type of real-time stochastic resource allocation problem. Firstly, one distinction is that certain tasks may create other tasks. Then, positive and negative interactions among the resources are considered, in achieving the tasks, in order to obtain and maintain an efficient coordination. A standard Multiagent Markov Decision Process (MMDP) approach is too prohibitive to solve this type of problem in real-time. To address this complex resource management problem, the merging of an approach which considers the complexity associated to a high number of different resource types (i.e. Multiagent Task Associated Markov Decision Processes (MTAMDP)), with an approach which considers the complexity associated to the creation of task by other tasks (i.e. Acyclic Decomposition) is proposed. The combination of these two approaches produces a near-optimal solution in much less time than a standard MMDP approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.