Negotiation tactics for autonomous agents

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.

Multi-agent systems and applications, 2006

This paper presents some of the key techniques for reaching agreements in multi-agent environments. It discusses game-theory and economics based techniques: strategic negotiation, auctions, coalition formation, market-oriented programming and contracting. It also presents logical based mechanisms for argumentations. The focus of the survey is on negotiation of self-interested agents, but several mechanisms for cooperative agents who need to resolve conflicts that arise from conflicting beliefs about different aspects of their environment are also mentioned. For space reasons, we couldn't cover all the relevant works, and the papers that are mentioned only demonstrate the possible approaches. We present some of the properties of the approaches using our own previous work.

Computational Intelligence, 1995

2009

With an increasing number of applications in the context of multi-agent systems, automated negotiation is a rapidly growing area. Written by top researchers in the field, this state-of-the-art treatment of the subject explores key issues involved in the design of negotiating agents, covering strategic, heuristic, and axiomatic approaches. The authors discuss the potential benefits of automated negotiation as well as the unique challenges it poses for computer scientists and for researchers in artificial intelligence. They also consider possible applications and give readers a feel for the types of domain where automated negotiation is already being deployed. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in computer science who are interested in multi-agent systems. It will also appeal to negotiation researchers from disciplines such as management and business studies, psychology, and economics.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Complex Automated Negotiations have been widely studied and are becoming an important, emerging area in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. In general, automated negotiations can be complex, since there are a lot of factors that characterize such negotiations. These factors include the number of issues, dependency between issues, representation of utility, negotiation protocol, negotiation form (bilateral or multi-party), time constraints, etc. Software agents can support automation or simulation of such complex negotiations on the behalf of their owners, and can provide them with adequate bargaining strategies. In many multi-issue bargaining settings, negotiation becomes more than a zero-sum game, so bargaining agents have an incentive to cooperate in order to achieve efficient win-win agreements. Also, in a complex negotiation, there could be multiple issues that are interdependent.

Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2011

Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between people and automated agents we organized the first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010). The purpose of the competition is to facilitate the research in the area bilateral multi-issue closed negotiation. The competition was based on the Genius environment, which is a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation. The first competition was held in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-10) and was comprised of seven teams. This paper presents an overview of the competition, as well as general and contrasting approaches towards negotiation strategies that were adopted by the participants of the competition. Based on analysis in post-tournament experiments, the paper also attempts to provide some insights with regard to effective approaches towards the design of negotiation strategies.

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.

ECMS 2008 Proceedings edited by: L. S. Louca, Y. Chrysanthou, Z. Oplatkova, K. Al-Begain, 2008

Autonomous agents with negotiation competence are becoming increasingly important and pervasive. This paper follows an interdisciplinary approach to build autonomous negotiating agents by considering both game-theoretic techniques and bargaining procedures from the social sciences. The paper presents a generic model that handles bilateral multi-issue negotiation, describes equilibrium strategies for the bargaining game of alternating offers, and formalizes important strategies used by human negotiators. Autonomous agents equipped with the model are able to negotiate under both complete and incomplete information, thereby making them very compelling for automated negotiation.

Knowledge …, 1999

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Negotiation is an important and pervasive form of social interaction. The design of autonomous negotiating agents involves the consideration of insights from multiple relevant research areas to integrate different perspectives on negotiation. As a starting point for an interdisciplinary research effort, this paper presents a model that handles bilateral multi-issue negotiation, employs game-theoretic techniques to define equilibrium strategies for the bargaining game of alternating offers, and formalizes a set of negotiation strategies and tactics studied in the social sciences. Autonomous agents equipped with the model are currently being developed using the Jade framework. The agents are able to negotiate under both complete and incomplete information, thereby making the model in particular and the agents in general very compelling for automated negotiation.