Intelligent Resource Exchanges: Solutions and Pathways in a Workforce Allocation Problem

Botond Virginas (Intelligent Systems Lab, British Telecom, United Kingdom)

Marian Ursu (University of London, United Kingdom)

Edward Tsang (University of Essex, United Kingdom)

Gilbert Owusu (Intelligent Systems Lab, British Telecom, United Kingdom)

Chris Voudouris (Intelligent Systems Lab, British Telecom, United Kingdom)

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of resource allocation in the service industries approached from an agent-based perspective. Agent technologies seem to be well suited to this domain by providing a distributed environment, are network centric, semi-autonomous and collaborative and can communicate with each other to achieve better optimisation with little human intervention. The paper describes the context of this solution, a general power model and several pathways with corresponding example implementations with results and discussion The novelty of the solution resides in the fact that it is a natural and versatile formulation that combines an agent-based model with various artificial intelligence and operations research techniques such as rule-based expressions of allocation strategies and multi-criteria optimisation expressions of allocation objectives.

Keywords: case studies and reports on deployments, e-business agents, multi-agent planning

Categories: D.0, D.1.1, D.1.5, D.2.2, D.2.3, D.2.6, D.2.7