A Formal Study of Distributed Resource Allocation Strategies in Multi-Agent Systems

In multi-agent systems, centralized optimal solutions are often impractical due to scalability and resource limitation issues which makes simpler distributed algorithms preferable. Unfortunately, there has been little work that formally studies different distributed systems to predict their performance or explain their behavior. In this work, we study three different distributed resource allocation strategies in a simple problem setting. We built a formal model that predicts the performance of different systems and verified the result through simulation. The performance of the distributed algorithms are compared to the centralized optimal solution. This work shows that it is possible to build a formal model for a distributed resource allocation problem. The simulation results shed some light on the advantages and disadvantages of a centralized solution and various distributed solutions.