An Adaptive Strategy for Allocation of Resources with Gradually or Abruptly Changing Capacities

In some resource allocation problems, the capacities of resources may change gradually or abruptly. We study a class of such resource allocation problems in this paper. The system consists of competitive agents that choose among several resources with changing capacities. The objective is that agents can adapt to the dynamic environment and make good utilisation of resources. We design an adaptive strategy for agents to use so that agents are not only able to adapt to the environment with gradually changing capacities but also with abruptly changing capacities so as to make good utilisation of resources. This strategy is based on individual agent's experience and prediction. Simulations show that agents using the adaptive strategy can adapt effectively to the changing capacity levels and the system as a whole results in better utilisation of resources than previous work.