Dutch Auction Based Approach for Task/Resource Allocation

The introduction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in the industry through the digitalization of equipment, also known as Digital Twins, allows for a more customized production. Due to high market fluctuation, the implementation of a CPS should guarantee a high flexibility in both hardware and software levels to achieve a high responsiveness of the system. The software reconfiguration, specifically, introduces a question: “With heterogeneous equipment with different capabilities - namely processing and memory capabilities - where a certain software module should execute?”; that question fits on the task/resource allocation area applied to CPS software reconfiguration. Although in task allocation issue several approaches address such a problem, only a few of them focus on CPS resources optimization. Given that, an approach based on the Dutch Auction algorithm is proposed, implemented at the CPS level enables the software reconfiguration of the CPS according to the existing equipment resources. This approach, besides the optimization of the CPS resources and the energy consumption, transforms the CPS in more reliable and fault-tolerant systems. As shown by the results, despite the demonstration of its suitability in task/resource allocation problems in decentralized architectures, the proposed approach also as a major advantage of quickly finding a near-optimal solution.