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
Botond 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
Corresponding author: Botond Virginas ( botond.virginas@bt.com ) © Botond Virginas, Marian Ursu, Edward Tsang, Gilbert Owusu, Chris Voudouris. This article is freely available under the J.UCS Open Content License. Citation:
Virginas B, Ursu M, Tsang E, Owusu G, Voudouris C (2008) Intelligent Resource Exchanges: Solutions and Pathways in a Workforce Allocation Problem. JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 14(14): 2343-2358. https://doi.org/10.3217/jucs-014-14-2343 |  |
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