  Market price systems constitute a well-understood class of mechanisms that
under certain conditions provide effective decentralization of decision making
with minimal communication overhead. In a market-oriented programming approach
to distributed problem solving, we derive the activities and resource
allocations for a set of computational agents by computing the competitive
equilibrium of an artificial economy. WALRAS provides basic constructs for
defining computational market structures, and protocols for deriving their
corresponding price equilibria. In a particular realization of this approach
for a form of multicommodity flow problem, we see that careful construction of
the decision process according to economic principles can lead to efficient
distributed resource allocation, and that the behavior of the system can be
meaningfully analyzed in economic terms.
