Utility Driven Mobile-Agent Scheduling

Dartmouth Technical Report PCS-TR98-331

	Jonathan Bredin
	David Kotz
	Daniela Rus

Date: October 1998

URL (compressed postscript): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR98-331.ps.Z> (136KB)

URL (PDF): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR98-331.pdf> (240KB)

Abstract:
   We investigate the possibility of using markets to
 regulate mobile agents, computer programs that
 are capable of migrating from one machine to
 another. Market participation requires quantitative
 information about resource consumption to define
 demand and calculate utility.
   We create a formal utility model to derive
 user-demand functions, allowing agents to
 efficiently plan expenditure and deal with price
 fluctuations.  By quantifying demand and utility,
 resource owners can precisely set a value for a
 good.  We simulate our model in a mobile agent
 scheduling environment and show how prices
 fluctuate, compounding uncertainty in an agent's
 plans. To solve this problem, we propose that
 resource owners sell options to allow agents to
 trade away their risk.

Note:
 Original version in May 1998; revised October 3, 1998. See
 <a href="http://agent.cs.dartmouth.edu/papers/#market">related papers.</a>