Followings are short discriptions of current research topics. More detailed information of past and current research activities is available in Publications.
Elastic service distribution through "YuuZuu" reservation
Services are perishable and are simultaneously produced and consumed. A reservation is a traditional and effective means for coordinating service demand and supply. In recent years, computerized reservation systems have been used widely by many service vendors such as airline companies and hotels to improve their profits. We propose a "YuuZuu'' reservation that motivates cooperation among customers with different preferences for services and increases utilization of vendor-provided services. The DREAM reservation system, which is an implementation of "YuuZuu'' reservation, comprises three functions: (1) reservation allocation, (2) price optimization, and (3) demand prediction. Preliminary experiments show that the DREAM reservation system outperforms a standard reservation system when some customers are insistent upon detailed preferences and others are not, which, we believe, reflects real-world conditions in many services industries.
Multiagent control of complicated network systems
We propose a multi-agent coordination technique to maintain throughput of a large-scale agent network system in the face of failures of agents. Failures do not just deteriorate throughput of the system but also create and change bottlenecks in the system. Since loss of bottleneck's capacity degrades the overall system performance, the system should identify bottlenecks dynamically and keep their utilization at a high level. In our system, CABS, information about an agent's urgency of jobs to fulfill demanded throughput and maintain its utilization is passed to upstream agents in the network. Upstream agents utilize this information to identify bottleneck agents and coordinate their actions to provide the bottlenecks with necessary and sufficient jobs for preventing their starvation and congestion. We empirically evaluate CABS using a benchmark problem of the semiconductor fabrication process, which is a good example of a large-scale network system, in comparison with a well-known traditional manufacturing control method.