The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver

Source: ScienceDirect / Morgan Kaufmann reprint of the IEEE paper Authors: Reid G. Smith Date: 1980-12 Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers 29(12)

Key points

• Introduces task sharing through negotiation rather than static assignment from a central controller.
• The core problem is the “connection problem”: matching nodes with pending work to nodes with suitable idle capability.
• Uses announcements, bids, and awards so resource allocation and focus can be distributed instead of bottlenecked at one manager.
• The protocol is motivated explicitly as a way to distribute both control and data, avoid bottlenecks, and make allocation decisions with finer granularity than traditional centralized mechanisms.