A Decision-Theoretic Model For Cooperative Transportation Scheduling

In this paper we analyse the domain of transportation scheduling in shipping companies from the perspective of decision theory. After giving a brief description of the application and the simulation system Mars based on the multiagent paradigm, the transportation domain is characterised along the lines of the definitions given in [Zlotkin & Rosenschein 93]. The paper comes up with the result that it is useful to split up the class of task-oriented domains into two subclasses: cooperative and competitive task-oriented domains. The paper shows that properties like subadditivity only hold only for very specific subproblems in the transportation domain. We prove that lying may be beneficial in the transportation domain. We argue that, based on this result, it is highly desirable to have negotiation strategies for agents in the transportation domain which are robust against lying. The last section describes such a negotiation strategy