A Trust- and Cooperation-Based Solution of a Dynamic Resource Allocation Problem

Resource allocation is a common problem in technical systems. For instance, the main task in power management systems is to maintain the balance between energy production and consumption at all times. If such a resource allocation problem has to be solved in a multi-agent system in a decentralized or regionalized manner, agents have to rely on cooperation due to their limited resources and knowledge. In open systems, various uncertainties - introduced by the environment as well as the agents' possibly self-interested or even malicious behavior - have to be taken into account to be able to allocate the resources according to the actual demand. Trust has been proposed as a concept to measure and deal with such uncertainties. In this paper, we present a trust-and cooperation-based algorithm that solves a dynamic resource allocation problem in open multi-agent systems. Throughout the paper, the problem of creating power plant schedules in decentralized autonomous power management systems serves as a running example to illustrate our algorithm and results.