A Distributed and Automatic Negotiation Protocol for Resource Allocation in the Management of Traffic Accidents

Abstract

Several resources must be devoted to deal with the management of a traffic accident. However, these resources are managed by several independent agencies. The current solutions to coordinate the resources of these agencies are being provided manually by using centralized systems, obviating the distributed nature of the problem. This paper presents a new distributed combinatorial auction PAUSE based protocol suitable to be used in these types of situations. The main innovation in this new protocol is that it allows to allocate efficiently resources grouped by types. In addition it can exploit the existing synergy between the resources provided by any single agency. A multiagent system, MAS, has been programmed to evaluate the performance of this protocol in the traffic accidents domain. The assignments of resources proposed by this MAS show that the protocol provides efficient solutions close to the optimal ones.