Distributed task allocation in social networks

This paper proposes a new variant of the task allocation problem, where the agents are connected in a social network and tasks arrive at the agents distributed over the network. We show that the complexity of this problem remains NPhard. Moreover, it is not approximable within some factor. We develop an algorithm based on the contract-net protocol. Our algorithm is completely distributed, and it assumes that agents have only local knowledge about tasks and resources. We conduct a set of experiments to evaluate the performance and scalability of the proposed algorithm in terms of solution quality and computation time. Three different types of networks, namely small-world, random and scale-free networks, are used to represent various social relationships among agents in realistic applications. The results demonstrate that our algorithm works well and that it scales well to large-scale applications. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 [Distributed Artificial Intelligence]: Multiag...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Mathijs de Weerdt, Yingqian Zhang, Tomas Klos
• Keywords: Algorithm, ATAL 2007, Social Networks, Task Allocation