Adapting the contract net protocol for publish/subscribe messaging

The contract net protocol (CNP) is widely adopted in agent-based systems for task allocation in a distributed environment. Conventional CNP requires only simple messaging services such as direct addressing and broadcasting. Publish/subscribe (P/S) is a highly flexible middleware-based messaging service for distributed applications. Previous experiments on incorporating P/S into agent-based systems for task allocation have shown interesting ways to adapt the conventional CNP with potential performance advantages. The paper first reviews some previous adaptations to CNP in generic terms without any application details. It then introduces a new further step to the adaptations to obtain fully distributed bid selection in the task selection process.