Decentralized Markets versus Central Control: A Comparative Study

TL;DR

This paper compares decentralized multi-agent market-based control systems with traditional central control in climate management, revealing that local info and market communication can achieve effective global control.

Contribution

It provides an empirical comparison of multi-agent market solutions versus conventional control methods in climate control applications, offering new insights into their relative advantages and limitations.

Findings

Market-based approaches can outperform traditional control in certain scenarios.

Local information combined with market communication enables effective global control.

The study highlights specific benefits and limitations of multi-agent systems in practical applications.

Abstract

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) promise to offer solutions to problems where established, older paradigms fall short. In order to validate such claims that are repeatedly made in software agent publications, empirical in-depth studies of advantages and weaknesses of multi-agent solutions versus conventional ones in practical applications are needed. Climate control in large buildings is one application area where multi-agent systems, and market-oriented programming in particular, have been reported to be very successful, although central control solutions are still the standard practice. We have therefore constructed and implemented a variety of market designs for this problem, as well as different standard control engineering solutions. This article gives a detailed analysis and comparison, so as to learn about differences between standard versus agent approaches, and yielding new insights about benefits and limitations of computational markets. An important outcome is that "local information plus market communication produces global control".