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A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation

A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation
A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation
If agents are to negotiate automatically with one another they must share a negotiation mechanism, specifying what possible actions each party can take at any given time, when negotiation terminates, and what is the structure of the resulting agreements. Current standardization activities such as FIPA [2] and WS-Agreement [3] represent this as a negotiation protocol specifying the flow of messages. However, they omit other aspects of the rules of negotiation (such as obliging a participant to improve on a previous offer), requiring these to be represented implicitly in an agent's design, potentially resulting incompatibility, maintenance and re-usability problems. In this chapter, we propose an alternative approach, allowing all of a mechanism to be formal and explicit. We present (i) a taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way; (ii) a simple interaction protocol, which is able to support any mechanism which can be captured using the declarative rules; (iii) a software framework for negotiation that allows agents to effectively participate in negotiations defined using our rule taxonomy and protocol and (iv) a language for expressing aspects of the negotiation based on OWL-Lite [4]. We provide examples of some of the mechanisms that the framework can support.
213-235
Springer
Bartolini, C.
3dbe193e-e82f-4534-a692-7f2057dd7aa5
Priest, C.
f1a1ea30-b0af-4ec2-bdcc-f61746aa9dfb
Jennings, N. R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
Choren, R.
Garcia, A.
Lucena, C.
Ramonovsky, A.
Bartolini, C.
3dbe193e-e82f-4534-a692-7f2057dd7aa5
Priest, C.
f1a1ea30-b0af-4ec2-bdcc-f61746aa9dfb
Jennings, N. R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
Choren, R.
Garcia, A.
Lucena, C.
Ramonovsky, A.

Bartolini, C., Priest, C. and Jennings, N. R. (2005) A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation. In, Choren, R., Garcia, A., Lucena, C. and Ramonovsky, A. (eds.) Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems III: Research Issues and Practical Applications. Springer, pp. 213-235.

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

If agents are to negotiate automatically with one another they must share a negotiation mechanism, specifying what possible actions each party can take at any given time, when negotiation terminates, and what is the structure of the resulting agreements. Current standardization activities such as FIPA [2] and WS-Agreement [3] represent this as a negotiation protocol specifying the flow of messages. However, they omit other aspects of the rules of negotiation (such as obliging a participant to improve on a previous offer), requiring these to be represented implicitly in an agent's design, potentially resulting incompatibility, maintenance and re-usability problems. In this chapter, we propose an alternative approach, allowing all of a mechanism to be formal and explicit. We present (i) a taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way; (ii) a simple interaction protocol, which is able to support any mechanism which can be captured using the declarative rules; (iii) a software framework for negotiation that allows agents to effectively participate in negotiations defined using our rule taxonomy and protocol and (iv) a language for expressing aspects of the negotiation based on OWL-Lite [4]. We provide examples of some of the mechanisms that the framework can support.

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Published date: 2005
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 260807
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/260807
PURE UUID: 747f7306-c67d-4c34-abf2-7f049d4a332f

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Date deposited: 29 Apr 2005
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 06:43

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Contributors

Author: C. Bartolini
Author: C. Priest
Author: N. R. Jennings
Editor: R. Choren
Editor: A. Garcia
Editor: C. Lucena
Editor: A. Ramonovsky

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