The Marbles Manifesto: A Definition and Comparison of Cooperative Negotiation Schemes for Distributed Resource Allocation

Abstract

Marbles schemes are a family of cooperative and adaptive algorithms for distributed resource allocation problems. Long-term goals for these schemes are fault-tolerance and real-time performance in which a good timely solution is preferable to an optimal but too late solution. This paper reports work in progress where we compare the performance and analyze characteristics of different Marbles schemes and centralized solvers working on large scale and complex resource allocation problems. Introduction – the Marbles Vision Recent advances in miniaturization and robotics have led to interest in research on the “autonomous agents ” that make up a team of, say, robotic soccer players or Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs). These agents can act