Analysis of task allocation based on social utility and incompatible individual preference

Abstract

This paper proposes a task allocation method in which, although social utility is attempted to be maximized, agents also give weight to individual preferences based on their own specifications and capabilities. Due to the recent advances in computer and network technologies, many services can be provided by appropriately combining multiple types of information and different computational capabilities. The tasks that are carried out to perform these services are executed by allocating them to appropriate agents, which are computational entities having specific functionalities. However, these tasks are huge and appear simultaneously, and task allocation is thus a challenging issue since it is a combinatorial problem. The proposed method, which is based on our previous work, allocates resources/tasks to the appropriate agents by taking into account both social utility and individual preferences. We experimentally demonstrate that the appropriate strategy to decide the preference depends on the type of task and the features of the reward function as well as the social utility.