Coordination and information exchange among resource management agents

We aim to reduce the overhead of information gathering and updates in a scenario of semi-autonomous resource management agents in a multi-agent environment. We investigate the importance of coordinating timing of events compared with the level of information exchange among the agents; and how this affects deviations from best-case management as predicted by theoretical models. We demonstrate that asynchronous interaction between management agents requires only a small amount of information exchange between the agents to achieve near-optimal results. This suggests that there are lightweight alternatives to centralized data gathering and planning to achieve autonomic service management.