Intelligent Resource Exchanges: Solutions and Pathways in a Workforce Allocation Problem

This paper considers the problem of resource allocation in the service industries approached from an agent-based perspective. Agent technologies seem to be well suited to this domain by providing a distributed environment, are network centric, semi-autonomous and collaborative and can communicate with each other to achieve better optimisation with little human intervention. The paper describes the context of this solution, a general power model and several pathways with corresponding example implementations with results and discussion The novelty of the solution resides in the fact that it is a natural and versatile formulation that combines an agent-based model with various artificial intelligence and operations research techniques such as rule-based expressions of allocation strategies and multi-criteria optimisation expressions of allocation objectives.