Mobile agents in distributed meeting scheduling: A case study for distributed applications

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Zaki, Younes | Pierre, Samuel^{; *}

Affiliations: Department of Computer Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, Succ. Centre-ville, Montréal, QC, Canada H3C 3A7

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: samuel.pierre@polymtl.ca

Abstract: This paper proposes solutions based on mobile agents using mono-agent and multi-agent strategies for distributed meeting scheduling problem. Mobile agents are used in a typical decision-making scenario where they migrate to a calendar server to schedule a meeting between participants having time-conflicts. The mobile agent will either find a schedule matching all constraints or propose the best relaxed schedule violating some low-priority constraints, if no schedule respecting all constraints is found. The performance comparison is based on two metrics: the execution time and the total network load generated. Performance study results identify the cost of many operations used by the agent-based paradigm, such as inter-agent communications and agent migration, in relation to the nature and size of information exchanged. The overall experimental results provide a glimpse of the possibilities that software agents offer to solve distributed problems.

Keywords: Decision making, communication, coordination, distributed applications, mobile agents, multi-agent systems (MAS), multiparty event scheduling

DOI: 10.3233/IDT-2007-11-207

Journal: Intelligent Decision Technologies, vol. 1, no. 1-2, pp. 71-82, 2007