JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 14(14): 2343-2358, doi: 10.3217/jucs-014-14-2343
Intelligent Resource Exchanges: Solutions and Pathways in a Workforce Allocation Problem
expand article infoBotond Virginas, Marian Ursu§, Edward Tsang|, Gilbert Owusu, Chris Voudouris
‡ Intelligent Systems Lab, British Telecom, United Kingdom§ University of London, London, United Kingdom| University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom¶ Intelligent Systems Lab, British Telecom, Ipswich, United Kingdom
Open Access
Abstract
This paper considers the problem of resource allocation in the service industries approached from an agent-based perspective. Agent technologies seem to be well suited to this domain by providing a distributed environment, are network centric, semi-autonomous and collaborative and can communicate with each other to achieve better optimisation with little human intervention. The paper describes the context of this solution, a general power model and several pathways with corresponding example implementations with results and discussion The novelty of the solution resides in the fact that it is a natural and versatile formulation that combines an agent-based model with various artificial intelligence and operations research techniques such as rule-based expressions of allocation strategies and multi-criteria optimisation expressions of allocation objectives.
Keywords
multi-agent planning, e-business agents, case studies and reports on deployments