A New Multi-Agent Hybrid Marketplace for Cloud Resource Allocation

Stagnation of the negotiation-based cloud market refers to a condition of having negligible or no successful (good) deals. Cloud market stagnation should be reduced as it has a detrimental effect on the market outcomes. One of the effective steps towards overcoming market stagnation is by focusing on temporary replacing the pricing mechanism with the more effective ones. To do this, we propose a new agent-based hybrid marketplace in which the elements of the negotiation market are combined with the elements of auction as another well-known market-driven pricing mechanism. That is, negotiation market is considered as the main basis of the proposed hybrid market where each resource provider can make decisions about holding ad-hoc auction(s) when experiencing high market pressure to exit the market stagnation and create dynamism in the market. Thus, in this paper, issues and challenges related to when and how an auction should be held are answered. Extensive amounts of simulation were carried out to evaluate the performance of dealer agents who deal in the proposed hybrid market in comparison with MBDNAs known as (Market-and-Behavior-Driven Negotiation Agents) in terms of average utility, success rate, and the time needed to reach an agreement. The results show that our designed dealer agents outperform MBDNAs.