Scalable mechanism design for the procurement of services with uncertain durations

In this paper, we study a service procurement problem with uncertainty as to whether service providers are capable of completing a given task within a specified deadline. This type of setting is often encountered in large and dynamic multi-agent systems, such as computational Grids or clouds. To effectively deal with this uncertainty, the consumer may dynamically and redundantly procure multiple services over time, in order to increase the probability of success, while at the same time balancing this with the additional procurement costs. However, in order to do this optimally, the consumer requires information about the providers' costs and their success probabilities over time. This information is typically held privately by the providers and they may have incentives to misreport this, so as to increase their own profits. To address this problem, we introduce a novel mechanism that incentivises self-interested providers to reveal their true costs and capabilities, and we show t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Enrico Gerding, Sebastian Stein, Kate Larson, Alex Rogers, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: Additional Procurement Costs, ATAL 2010, Intelligent Agents, Service Procurement, Service Procurement Problem