Experimental evaluation of a-teams solving resource availability cost problem

Abstract

In this paper, a multi-agent system (MAS) based on the Asynchronous Team (A-Team) concept employs different cooperation strategies to solving the resource availability cost problem (RACP). The strategies proposed are experimentally validated. The RACP, known also as the resource investment problem (RIP), belongs to the class of NP-hard optimization problems. To solve the problem, the A-Team-based system which uses asynchronous agents implemented in the JADEbased A-Team (JABAT) environment has been proposed. Four strategies and four kinds of optimization agents are used. In this paper, one static and three dynamic strategies are used to manage the A-Team. The approach is validated experimentally using 144 problem instances.