Concurrent bilateral negotiation in agent systems

Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 1997

Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXV, 2009

Knowledge …, 1999

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 1998

We present a formal model of negotiation between autonomous agents. The purpose of the negotiation is to reach an agreement about the provision of a service by one agent for another. The model de nes a range of strategies and tactics that agents can employ to generate initial o ers, evaluate proposals and o er counter proposals. The model is based on computationally tractable assumptions, demonstrated in the domain of business process management and empirically evaluated.

2004

To secure good deals, an agent may engage in multiple concurrent negotiations for a particular good or service. However for this to be effective, the agent needs to carefully coordinate its negotiations. At a basic level, such coordination should ensure the agent does not procure more of the good than is needed. But to really derive benefit from such an approach, the agent needs the concurrent encounters to mutually influence one another (e.g. a good price with one opponent should enable an agent to negotiate more strongly in the other interactions). To this end, this paper presents a novel heuristic model for coordinating multiple bilateral negotiations. The model is empirically evaluated and shown to be effective and robust in a range of negotiation scenarios.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010

This paper addresses a coordination problem during concurrent multiple bilateral negotiations. Real time decisions need to be taken during negotiation to ensure that the overall negotiation process is successful in terms of achieving a valuable agreement (an agreement with high utility). Existing approaches for managing concurrent multiple bilateral negotiation typically rely on historic information such as the probability distribution of the opponents' reservation prices, deadlines, or the results of the previous negotiations. This paper presents a novel heuristic coordination mechanism for coordinating concurrent multiple bilateral negotiations assuming no previous knowledge about the opponents. The proposed method uses two measures to evaluate the relative behavior of each opponent. The first measure uses the first-order differences of the current negotiation offers and calculates the relative concession for each opponent agent that depends on the mutual concessions of all agents involved in negotiation. The second measure uses a scoring function to evaluate each of the seller's last offer during negotiation. We use both measures to change the negotiation strategy during negotiation. The empirical results show that our model is more effective when compared with some existing approaches.

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.

2004

Autonomous agents operate in complex environments and, over time, conflicts inevitably occur among them. Negotiation is the predominant process for resolving conflicts. This paper presents a generic negotiation model for autonomous agents that handles multiparty, multi-issue and repeated rounds. The model is based on computationally tractable assumptions, accounts for a tight integration of the individual capability of planning and the social capability of negotiation, and formalizes a set of human negotiation procedures. 3 THE NEGOTIATION MODEL Let Ag = {ag1,. .. , agn}, Ag ⊆ Agents, be a set of autonomous agents. Let PAg = {p 1k ,. .. , p nk }, be a set of plans of the agents in Ag including intentions IAg = {int 1kl ,. .. , int nkl }, respectively for agents ag1,. .. , agn. Let ConfAg be a conflict of interests among the agents in Ag. This section presents a domain-independent description of a computational model of negotiation. 3.1 Preparing and planning for negotiation The prenegotiation model defines the main tasks that each agent agi ∈ Ag must attend to in order to prepare for negotiation. A description of these tasks follows.

Journal of Mathematics and Computer Science, 2014

In negotiation process, when a conflict arises between people in a society, each will try to pose some arguments to resolve the conflict and convince the other party. Successful termination of many of these interactions is not achieved only via exchange of a series of single-message suggestions and requires that an arguer offer compelling justifications to prove his/her claim. Obviously, before negotiation is started, decision should be made about the terms and arguments that can convince the other side and terminate negotiations successfully. In other words, an exact plan of arguments and their order should be prepared. The same is true about a multi-agent environment where each agent needs planning and executing a sequence of actions to achieve its goals. Some actions in these sequences are under the direct control of the planner agent and others require negotiations with other agents. Negotiation is usually carried out during the plan execution, however, it can be considered during the planning stage, as in real life. In this paper, we present a new approach that takes into account incomplete information about opponent's position in negotiation by using a nondeterministic planner with incomplete knowlage and sensing actions. We evaluate our approach by solving a well known negotiation scenario.