Concurrent bi-lateral negotiation in agent systems (original) (raw)

A Heuristic Model for Concurrent Bi-Lateral Negotiations In Incomplete Information Settings

INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON …, 2003

Bi-lateral negotiations represent an important class of encounter in agent-based systems. To this end, this paper develops and evaluates a heuristic model that enables an agent to participate in multiple, concurrent bi-lateral encounters in competitive situations in which there is information uncertainty and deadlines. 'A service is here viewed an abstract representation of the capability of an agent.

Complex negotiations in multi-agent systems

PhD Thesis, 2013

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are distributed systems where autonomous entities called agents, either human or software, pursue their own goals. The MAS paradigm has been proposed as the appropriate modeling approach for the deployment of applications like electronic commerce, multi-robot systems, security applications, and so forth. In the MAS community, the vision of open multi-agent system, where heterogeneous agents can enter and leave the system dynamically, has gained strength as a potentially interesting modeling paradigm due to its conceptual relation with technologies like world wide web, grid computing, and virtual organizations. Given the heterogeneity and agent's self-interest, conflict is a candidate phenomenon to arise in multi-agent systems. In the last few years, the term agreement technologies has been used to address all the mechanisms that, directly or indirectly, promote the resolution of conflicts in computational systems like multi-agent systems. Among agreement technologies, automated negotiation is proposed as one key mechanism in conflict resolution due to its analogous use in human conflict resolution. Automated negotiation consists of an automated exchange of proposals carried out by software agents on behalf of their users. The final goal is the achievement of an agreement with all the involved parts. Despite being studied by scholars in Artificial Intelligence for several years, several problems have not been addressed by the scientific community yet. The main objective of this thesis is proposing negotiation models for complex scenarios where the complexity may stem from (i) limited computational capabilities or (ii) the necessity to accommodate the preferences of multiple individuales. In the first part of the thesis we propose a bilateral negotiation model for the problem of negotiation in Ambient Intelligence (AmI), a domain with a special emphasis on computational efficiency due to the limited capability of AmI devices. In the second part of the thesis we propose several negotiation models for agent-based negotiation teams. A negotiation team is a group of individuals that acts together as single negotiation party due to its common interests in the negotiation at hand. The complexity of negotiation teams resides in the fact that despite having common interests, intra-team conflict is also present. As far as we are concerned, the topic of negotiation teams in MAS is introduced with this thesis.

An Agent Architecture for Simultaneous Bilateral Negotiations

Artificial Intelligence Research and Development, 2010

In this paper we introduce an agent architecture for joint action negotiation among several agents in complex environments and with negotiation time bounds. The architecture is based on a graded BDI model and on an informationbased negotiation model. It is being tested using DipGame (http://www. dipgame.org).

An Agent Architecture for Concurrent Bilateral Negotiations

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2014

We present an architecture that makes use of symbolic decision-making to support agents participating in concurrent bilateral negotiations. The architecture is a revised version of previous work with the KGP model , which we specialise with knowledge about the agent's self, the negotiation opponents and the environment. Our work combines the specification of domain-independent decision-making with a new protocol for concurrent negotiation that revisits the well-known alternating offers protocol . We show how the decision-making can be specialised to represent the agent's strategies, utilities and preferences using a Prolog-like meta-program. The work prepares the ground for supporting decision-making in concurrent bilateral negotiations that is more lightweight than previous work and contributes towards a fully developed model of the architecture.

Strategic agents for multi-resource negotiation

Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2011

In electronic commerce markets where selfish agents behave individually, agents often have to acquire multiple resources in order to accomplish a high level task with each resource acquisition requiring negotiations with multiple resource providers. Thus, it is crucial to efficiently coordinate these interrelated negotiations. This paper presents the design and implementation of agents that concurrently negotiate with other entities for acquiring multiple resources. Negotiation agents in this paper are designed to adjust (1) the number of tentative agreements for each resource and (2) the amount of concession they are willing to make in response to changing market conditions and negotiation situations. In our approach, agents utilize a time-dependent negotiation strategy in which the reserve price of each resource is dynamically determined by (1) the likelihood that negotiation will not be successfully completed (conflict probability), (2) the expected agreement price of the resource, and (3) the expected number of final agreements. The negotiation deadline of each resource is determined by its relative scarcity. Agents are permitted to decommit from agreements by paying a time-dependent penalty, and a buyer can make more than one tentative agreement for each resource. The maximum number of tentative agreements for each resource made by an agent is constrained by the market situation. Experimental results show that our negotiation strategy achieved significantly more utilities than simpler strategies.

Agents Capable of Dynamic Negotiations

2003

Abstract. Support for negotiation is one of the more important research issues when developing agent systems utilized in e-commerce. While, depending on the type of the transaction, different negotiation procedures need to be utilized, only very few proposed frameworks are generic and flexible enough to handle multiple scenarios. This note presents negotiating agents, which can change their negotiation strategy depending on circumstances.

Agent-based approach to model parallel and concurrent negotiations

2013

Each organization has limited resources and in order to better accomplish a higher external demand, the managers are forced to outsource parts of their contracts even to concurrent organizations. In this concurrent environment each organization wants to preserve its decision autonomy and to disclose as little as possible from its business information. To model this interaction our approach is to define a framework for describing and managing parallel and concurrent negotiations among independent organizations acting in the same industrial market. The complexity of our negotiation model is done by the dynamic environment in which multi-attribute and multi-participant negotiations are racing over the same set of resources. We are using the metaphor Interaction Abstract Machines (IAMs) to model the parallelism and the non-deterministic aspects of our negotiation process.