Research

Recently the use of smartphone-based applications has received attention due to the emergence of a number of new online optimisation problems that involve reaching bi-lateral agreements, such as in ride-sharing applications. The majority of such apps currently require sending of a large number of requests or notifications to users. A typical goal of providers of these apps is to reduce the inconvenience to users by minimising the number of requests sent. In this paper we present a new multi-agent approach to managing how requests are sent between users of applications for reaching bi-lateral agreements. Each agent has a selfish behaviour based on his preferences and an altruist behaviour with respect to the links between the agent and his neighbours. The objective is to maximise the likelihood of an acceptable match while minimising the burden on the users due to unnecessary messaging. We provide a dynamic algorithm using this architecture and we present an empirical evaluation with various mathematical models of users’ behaviour and altruism. The evaluation shows that our approach can reduce the risks of rejections and the number of requests while increasing the likelihood of acceptable matches.