A Market - Oriented Programming Environment and itsApplication

Market price systems constitute a well-understood class of mechanisms that under certain conditions provide eeective decentralization of decision making with minimal communication overhead. In a market-oriented programming approach to distributed problem solving, we derive the activities and resource allocations for a set of computational agents by computing the competitive equilibrium of an artiicial economy. Walras provides basic constructs for deening computational market structures, and protocols for deriving their corresponding price equilibria. In a particular realization of this approach for a form of multicommodity ow problem, we see that careful construction of the decision process according to economic principles can lead to eecient distributed resource allocation, and that the behavior of the system can be meaningfully analyzed in economic terms. In a distributed or multiagent planning system, the plan for the system as a whole is a composite of plans produced by its constituent agents. These plans may interact signiicantly in both the resources required by each of the agents' activities (preconditions) and the products resulting from these activities (postconditions). Despite these interactions, it is often advantageous or necessary to distribute the planning process because agents are separated geographically, have diierent information, possess distinct capabilities or authority, or have been designed and implemented separately. In any case, because each agent has limited competence and awareness of the decisions produced by others, some sort of coordination is required to maximize the performance of the overall system. However, allocating resources via central control or extensive communication is deemed infeasible, as it violates whatever constraints dictated distribution of the planning task in the rst place. The task facing the designer of a distributed planning system is to deene a computa-tionally eecient coordination mechanism and its realization for a collection of agents. The agent connguration may be given, or may itself be a design parameter. By the term agent, I refer to a module that acts within the mechanism according to its own knowledge and interests. The capabilities of the agents and their organization in an overall decision-making structure determine the behavior of the system as a whole. Because it concerns the collective behavior of self-interested decision makers, the design of this decentralized structure is fundamentally an exercise in economics or incentive engineering. The problem of developing architectures for distributed planning ts within the framework of mechanism design (Hur-wicz, 1977; Reiter, 1986), and many ideas and results from economics are directly applicable. In particular, the …