CENTRALISED VERSUS MARKET-BASED CONTROL UNDER ENVIRONMENT UNCERTAINTY: CASE OF THE MOBILE TASK ALLOCATION PROBLEM (MTAP)

Year 2011, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 79 - 88, 01.06.2011

Karim Al-yafı Habin Lee Afshin Mansourı

Abstract

This paper aims at comparing the centralised versus the market-based approach.
This is done in the context of the mobile task allocation problem (MTAP) from the
perspective of environmental uncertainty. MTAP is defined as an optimization
problem for planning the assignment of service tasks to mobile workers.
Environmental uncertainty is introduced through the injection of stochastic tasks
and dynamic travel delays. A multi-agent simulator is employed to experiment the
behaviour of each approach in reaction to different uncertainty levels.
Preliminary results suggest a tentative conceptual model to evaluate the
suitability of each approach to address MTAP in function of uncertainty. It is
suggested that uncertainty’s effect on achieved performance is moderated by the
timeliness of decision making, workers’ degree of local knowledge, and problem’s
complexity and size.

Keywords

Information system structures , operations management information systems , market-based computation , environment uncertainty , multi-agent simulation.

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