A group task allocation strategy in open and dynamic grid environments

Abstract

Against the problem of group task allocation with time constraints in open and dynamic grid environments, this paper proposes a decentralised indicator-based combinatorial auction strategy for group task allocation. In the proposed strategy, both resource providers and consumers are modeled as intelligent agents. All the agents are limited to communicating with their neighbour agents, therefore, the proposed strategy is decentralised. In addition, the proposed strategy allow agents to enter and leave the grid environments freely, and is robust to the dynamism and openness of the grid environments. Tasks in the proposed strategy have deadlines and might need the collaboration of a group of self-interested providers to be executed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed strategy outperforms a well-known decentralised task allocation strategy in terms of success rate, individual utility of the involved agents and the speed of task allocation.