Analysis of contract net in multi-agent systems

Application of contract net protocol requires the development of a bid evaluation procedure specific to the problem. Care must be taken to apply contract net protocol to tasks that involve precedence constraints among different operations and heterogeneous resources. The lack of a process model in the original contract net protocol makes it difficult to determine the feasibility of the resulting contracts. We propose a model to facilitate the development of the bid evaluation procedure by extending our previous results to handle tasks with more complex process structure. We formulate an optimization problem to find a minimal cost feasible execution sequence for a task.