Abstract
Contract process in our economic society constitutes a well-understood class of mechanisms that provide effective decentralisation of decision making with minimal communication overhead. In multi-agent programming approach to distributed problem solving, the resource allocation for a set of computational agents is derived by computing the dynamism of contract process of an artificial economy. In this paper a new concept based on multi-agent paradigm, called contract-net protocol, is proposed to facilitate appropriate resource allocations in distribution systems. Several utilities, such as resource price, trading lot size and due date, are implemented into each agent. Generally agent utility is categorised in human factor which is difficult to handle as a quantitative parameter. In this paper, two types of utility functions, regular type and non-regular type, are introduced into due date utility on our agents as a basic study to establish a precise model of the complicated distribution system. Individual contract process amongst agents emerges global solutions in the system. The proposed concept enables automated negotiation in distribution system, and that concludes the contract-net based approach with several utilities plays an important role in the coming agile era.
