Welfare Engineering in Practice: On the Variety of Multiagent Resource Allocation Problems

Abstract. Many problems studied in the multiagent systems community can be considered instances of an abstract multiagent resource allocation problem. In this problem, which is now better understood theoretically, the goal is to satisfy a criterion of global optimality (formulated in terms of a suitable notion of social welfare), given that the agents sharing a set of resources follow a local rationality criterion reflecting their individual preferences. In this paper, we first show that this simple decentralised resource allocation framework allows us to model a wide variety of applications. These applications thereby benefit from all the theoretical results concerning the framework. We then draw up a list of criteria which can guide the application designer working within the framework and illustrate the relevance of our approach by discussing several applications in view of this list of design criteria.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ESAW
• Authors: Yann Chevaleyre, Ulrich Endriss, Sylvia Estivie, Nicolas Maudet
• Keywords: ESAW 2004, Multiagent Resource Allocation, Multiagent Systems Community, Resource Allocation