New approaches to optimization and utility elicitation in autonomic Computing

Autonomic (self-managing) computing systems face the critical problem of resource allocation to different computing elements. Adopting a recent model, we view the problem of provisioning resources as involving utility elicitation and optimization to allocate resources given imprecise utility information. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for regret-based optimization that performs significantly faster than that proposed in earlier work. We also explore new regret-based elicitation heuristics that are able to find near-optimal allocations while requiring a very small amount of utility information from the distributed computing elements. Since regret-computation is intensive, we compare these to the more tractable Nelder-Mead optimization technique w.r.t. amount of utility information required. Copyright © 2005, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.