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Task and resource allocation is a key technology in Internet applications, such as grid computing and agent grids, for appropriately allocating tasks such as video and music downloads, scientific calculations, and language services (Cao et al., 2005; Chunlin & Layuan, 2006). In these applications, tasks should be allocated to and done in appropriate agents. Thus negotiation protocol for task allocation is one of the important issues in multiagent systems research. In particular, the contract net protocol (CNP) and its extensions have been widely used in certain applications because of their simplicity and superior performance (Sandholm, 1993; Smith, 1980; Weyns et al., 2006). Agents in CNP play one of two roles: as managers that are responsible for allocating tasks and monitoring processes, or as contractors that are responsible for executing the allocated tasks. A manager agent announces a task to contractor agents, which bid for the task with certain promised values (such as cost, duration, and payment). The manager then awards the task to the contractor (called an awardee) that bid with the best tender (before the deadline) and allocates the task to it. However, the naive CNP is usually assumed to be applied to allocating tasks in smallscale, non-busy multi-agent systems (MASs). Interference among agents is always observed in this kind of negotiation protocol. Consider many agents having to allocate tasks to other efficient contractors. In basic CNP, a contractor agent that receives task announcements bids for the tasks one by one. When many tasks are announced by many managers, however, they have to wait a long time to receive a sufficient number of bids. In the original conception of CNP (Smith, 1980), multiple bids were proposed to concurrently handle many announcements. If a contractor is awarded multiple tasks simultaneously, however, it may not be able to provide its promised quality or performance. In fact, efficient contractor agents are selected as awardees by many manager agents, leading to a concentration of tasks. In addition, when a large number of O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg

Characteristics of Contract-Based Task Allocation by a Large Number of Self-Interested Agents