Multi-unit auctions for allocating chance-constrained resources

Conference item

Sharing scarce resources is a key challenge in multi-agent interaction, especially when individual agents are uncertain about their future consumption. We present a new auction mechanism for preallocating multi-unit resources among agents, while limiting the chance of resource violations. By planning for a chance constraint, we strike a balance between worst-case approaches, which under-utilise resources, and expected-case approaches, which lack formal guarantees. We also present an algorithm that allows agents to generate bids via multi-objective reasoning, which are then submitted to the auction. We then discuss how the auction can be extended to non-cooperative scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that our auction outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for chance-constrained multi-agent resource allocation in complex settings with up to hundreds of agents.

Authors: Gautier, A; Lacerda, B; Hawes, N; Wooldridge, M

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: AAAI Publications
• Volume: 37
• Issue: 10
• Pages: 11560-11568
• Publication date: 2023-06-26
• Acceptance date: 2022-11-19
• Event title: 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023)
• Event location: Washington, DC, USA
• Event website: https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/
• Event start date: 2023-02-07
• Event end date: 2023-02-14
• DOI: 10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26366
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR