A distributed control system employs a number of autonomous cooperative units that intercommunicate with bids and counter bids to allocate the production of a product among them. Network traffic caused by these bid messages is significantly reduced by creating as a central clearinghouse, a global resource locator that can identify autonomous cooperative units more likely to be receptive to bids from other autonomous cooperative units. Portions of the data of the global resource locator are held at the particular computers implementing the autonomous cooperative units in a cache-like structure that may be referred to without network communication. Misses within this cache structure cause a refreshing of the cache from the global resource locator and an updating of a learning relation table that further improves predictions in the future. Historical successes in bidding are stored at the cache structure to further aid in selecting likely bid recipients.