A Case Study on Availability of Sensor Data in Agent Cooperation

Multi-agent cooperation can in several cases be used in order to mitigate problems relating to task sharing within physical processes. In this paper we apply agent based solutions to a class of problems defined by their property of being predictable from a macroscopic perspective while being highly stochastic when viewed at a microscopic level. These characteristic properties can be found in several industrial processes and applications, e.g. within the energy market where the production and distribution of electricity follow this pattern. Another defining problem characteristic is that the supply is usually limited as well as consisting of several layers of differentiating production costs. We evaluate and compare the performance of the agent system in three different scenarios, and for each such scenario it is shown to what degree the optimization system is dependent on the level of availability of sensor data.