Global Sensor Web Coordination and Control in a Multi-agent System

In large, distributed sensor web systems, allocating resources to complex user tasks presents significant challenges. Sensor web users and their desired tasks have differing importance in the sensor web, so designing a multi-agent framework to yield allocations that are both fair and efficient (high utility) is a challenging research problem. With complex, hierarchically-decomposable tasks, individual subtasks could potentially be assigned to a number of agents (e.g., when there is overlap in sensor or data processing capability among constituent sensor networks). Efficient allocation of subtasks within the proposed multi-agent framework presents additional challenges. Both of these research problems are further compounded by the dynamic nature of the sensor web, in which both desired tasks and resource availability change significantly with time and environmental conditions. This paper presents an overview of these research challenges and a solution approach employing broker agents in a novel variation of the contract net protocol (CNP) for fair and efficient allocation of complex tasks.