Starting with our early work on market-oriented programming, we have continuously investigated the potential of competitive markets for solving resource-allocation problems in a distributed manner. We developed a methodology for constructing computational markets in the framework of general-equilibrium theory (Wellman, 1996), and demonstrated the approach through a series of models of simplified domains (Mullen and Wellman, 1995, Wellman, 1995, Yamaki et al., 1996). This paved the way for subsequent investigation of discrete allocation problems, applied to canonical problems such as scheduling (Wellman et al., 2001a) and supply-chain formation. We continue to study market-based allocation scenarios in domains such as manufacturing scheduling, reconnaisance (Cheng et al., 2003), and dynamic information processing (Wellman and Cheng, 2003).
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