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The LLM Scheduler Earned Its Cost Only During the Surge

A strong fixed heuristic left no useful headroom for agents until safety-critical demand changed mid-run.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-08-22-026
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Summary

A strong fixed heuristic left no useful headroom for agents until safety-critical demand changed mid-run.

A deadline-first contract-net heuristic completed 90.2 percent of time-critical tasks across 60 simulated instances, beating 15 baselines and reaching 0.87 of an optimization upper bound. Under stationary load, the auction, per-window language-model policy and adaptation added nothing. During a mid-run safety-critical surge, the agent control plane improved over both the fixed heuristic and a bandit. The evidence is released simulation, not an autonomous-vehicle deployment.

Why it matters

A strong fixed heuristic left no useful headroom for agents until safety-critical demand changed mid-run.

Limits and context

  • The evidence is released simulation, not an autonomous-vehicle deployment.

Key claims

  1. A strong fixed heuristic left no useful headroom for agents until safety-critical demand changed mid-run.

    Qualification: The evidence is released simulation, not an autonomous-vehicle deployment.

    Evidence: source-2026-08-22-015

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2608.19557arXiv · primary research

Corrections

No corrections have been recorded for this story.