Evolutionary market agents for resource allocation in decentralised systems

Peter R. LEWIS, Paul MARROW, Xin YAO

Research output: Book Chapters | Papers in Conference ProceedingsConference paper (refereed)Researchpeer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We introduce self-interested evolutionary market agents, which act on behalf of service providers in a large decentralised system, to adaptively price their resources over time. Our agents competitively co-evolve in the live market, driving it towards the Bertrand equilibrium, the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium, at which all sellers charge their reserve price and share the market equally. We demonstrate that this outcome results in even load-balancing between the service providers. Our contribution in this paper is twofold; the use of on-line competitive co-evolution of self-interested service providers to drive a decentralised market towards equilibrium, and a demonstration that load-balancing behaviour emerges under the assumptions we describe. Unlike previous studies on this topic, all our agents are entirely self-interested; no cooperation is assumed. This makes our problem a non-trivial and more realistic one. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationParallel Problem Solving from Nature : PPSN X 10th International Conference Dortmund, Germany, September 13-17, 2008 Proceedings
EditorsGünter RUDOLPH, Thomas JANSEN, Nicola BEUME, Simon LUCAS, Carlo POLONI
PublisherSpringer Berlin Heidelberg
Pages1071-1080
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9783540877004
ISBN (Print)9783540876991
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008
Externally publishedYes
Event10th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2008 - Dortmund, Germany
Duration: 13 Sept 200817 Sept 2008

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublisherSpringer Berlin, Heidelberg
Volume5199
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference10th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2008
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityDortmund
Period13/09/0817/09/08

Keywords

  • Co-evolution
  • Decentralised systems
  • Load-balancing
  • Market-based control
  • Self-interested agents

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Evolutionary market agents for resource allocation in decentralised systems'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this