Craig Boutilier
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON M5S 3H5, Canada
email: cebly@cs.toronto.edu
Rajarshi Das, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Gerald Tesauro,
William E. Walsh
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
19 Skyline Dr.
Hawthorne, NY 10532, USA
email: rajarshi,kephart,gtesauro,wwalsh1@us.ibm.com
Abstract
Decentralized resource allocation is a key problem for large-scale
autonomic (or self-managing) computing systems. Motivated by a data
center scenario, we explore efficient techniques for resolving
resource conflicts via cooperative negotiation. Rather than computing
in advance the functional dependence of each element's utility upon
the amount of resource it receives, which could be prohibitively
expensive, each element's utility is elicited incrementally. Such
incremental utility elicitation strategies require the evaluation of
only a small set of sampled utility function points, yet they find
near-optimal allocations with respect to a minimax regret
criterion. We describe preliminary computational experiments that
illustrate the benefit of our approach.
To appear, UAI 2003
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