Engineering automated negotiations

To make automated negotiation widely used in real scenarios, it is necessary to develop advanced software systems that are able to carry out such negotiation in those scenarios. However, although much work has been done in automated negotiation, most of these efforts have been focused on the development of negotiation protocols and strategies and only a few are centred on software frameworks for automated negotiation. We are concerned with the engineering aspect of automated negotiation. Specifically, we detail a software framework to develop automated negotiations of service level agreements. Unlike other proposals, we provide a detailed description of elements for full decision-making support including evaluating offers, strategy selection, building a market and opponents model, and creating counterproposals

Intelligent Agents for Automated Cloud Computing Negotiation

Presently, cloud providers offer “off-the-shelf” Service Level Agreements (SLA), on a “take it or leave it” basis. This paper, alternatively, proposes customized SLAs. An automated negotiation is needed to establish customized SLAs between service providers and consumers with no previous knowledge of each other. Traditional negotiations between humans are often fraught with difficulty. Thus, in this work, the use of intelligent agents to represent cloud providers and consumers is advocated. Rubinstein’s Alternating Offers Protocol offers a suitable technical solution for this challenging problem. The purpose of this paper is to apply the state-of-the-art in negotiation automated algorithms/agents within a described Cloud Computing SLA framework, and to evaluate the most appropriate negotiation approach based on many criteria

Automated ubiquitos delivery of generalised services in a open market

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.Telecommunications networks, and the services delivered over those networks have become an integral part of most people's lives in the developed world. The range and availability of these services is increasing, however the management of services still lags well behind technical capability, providing unnecessary barriers to the adoption of available technology. The work described in this dissertation has a primary goal of enabling flexible, automated delivery of any telecommunication-based service. More specifically, a mechanism to solve the administrative problems in enabling end users to automatically establish service agreements for any available service, from any available provider. The aims of this work are to: 1. enable the description of service level agreements(SLA) for generalised telecommunication-based services, and 2. provide mechanisms by which those service level agreements may be managed. The term “generalised services” means that all service types are managed using a common framework and set of processes. To derive at a suitable service level agreement description language, the characteristics of telecommunication-based services are first analysed, along with considerations in delivering a service, including service quality, resource allocation and configuration, service pricing and service ubiquity. The current art in SLA description is studied and the requirements of an appropriate language are proposed. An ontological approach to SLA description is adopted, and an SLA description language is developed based on semantic web technologies. To develop the mechanisms for SLA management, the current art is first analysed, and a set of requirements for a suitable SLA management framework are proposed. These requirements are used to guide the design of a multi-agent SLA negotiation framework, including a detailed description of the communication model, framework processes, and social behaviour of the agents involved. Finally, the SLA description language and the negotiation framework are compared with the closest art, and are assessed against tightly argued criteria. An experimental framework and use cases are developed to explore an application of the proposed solution, and to validate completeness. The approach taken has led to the following two key contributions: 1. A set of formal ontologies that may be used to semantically describe secure service level agreements for any application domain. 2. A multi-agent system providing an open market where services can be discovered, participants identified, and negotiation performed using context specific mechanisms. The conclusions of the work are that an ontology-based SLA description language is appropriate for describing generalised SLAs, and that a distributed, agent based negotiation platform that is based on an open market and uses a minimal set of core processes with an extensible, ontology based communication mechanism is appropriate for managing service level agreements in a generalised, automated and ubiquitous way

Automatic Service Agreement Negotiators in Open Commerce Environments

There is a steady shift in e‑commerce from goods to services that must be provisioned according to service agreements. This study focuses on software frameworks to develop automated negotiators in open commerce environments. Analysis of the litera‑ ture on automated negotiation and typical case studies led to a catalog of 16 objective requirements and a conceptual model that was used to compare 11 state-of-the-art software frameworks. None of them was well suited for negotiating service agreements in open commerce environments. This motivated work on a reference architecture that provides the foundations to develop negotiation systems that address the previous requirements. A software framework was devised to validate the proposal by means of case studies. The study contributes to the fields of requirements engineering and software design, and is expected to support future efforts of practitioners and researchers because its findings bridge the gap among the existing automated negotiation techniques and lay the founda‑ tions for developing new software frameworksMinisterio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2006–00472Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009–07366Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-2533 (Isabel)Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007–64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02602Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-4100Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008–04718-

Facilitating B2B E-business by IT-supported business process negotiation services

Due to the complexity of business transactions and growing business automation demands from the B2B e-business community to swiftly respond to the ever-changing environment, workflow technology has been receiving more attention recently. The increasing popularity and adoption of workflow management system (WfMS) within organisations make workflow-based B2B e-business practically viable since more and more business transactions are implemented as automated processes and executed by WfMSs. Having been viewed as services by many researchers and practitioners, process-driven B2B e-business are conducted through service discovery and runtime execution. However, if there is no existing service provided by a desired business partner that matches the requirement then such a process will have to be negotiated and then created. Unfortunately, direct people-to-people negotiation followed by manual transformation of the negotiation outcome into processdriven services can be very resource consuming. Therefore, it is identified that there is a research gap in computer-aided negotiation approach for process-driven B2B e-business. This paper introduces essentials of workflow technology and negotiation. It then describes ways of capturing elements of negotiation from an operational view point. Finally, it explains how to integrate the IT-supported negotiation services into an overall cross-organisational workflow collaboration (COWCO) supporting framework

HiTrust: building cross-organizational trust relationship based on a hybrid negotiation tree

Small-world phenomena have been observed in existing peer-to-peer (P2P) networks which has proved useful in the design of P2P file-sharing systems. Most studies of constructing small world behaviours on P2P are based on the concept of clustering peer nodes into groups, communities, or clusters. However, managing additional multilayer topology increases maintenance overhead, especially in highly dynamic environments. In this paper, we present Social-like P2P systems (Social-P2Ps) for object discovery by self-managing P2P topology with human tactics in social networks. In Social-P2Ps, queries are routed intelligently even with limited cached knowledge and node connections. Unlike community-based P2P file-sharing systems, we do not intend to create and maintain peer groups or communities consciously. In contrast, each node connects to other peer nodes with the same interests spontaneously by the result of daily searches

Cloud service localisation

The essence of cloud computing is the provision of software and hardware services to a range of users in dierent locations. The aim of cloud service localisation is to facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing their adaption to dierent locales. We address the lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to dierent languages and regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations. The aim is to support and enforce the explicit modelling of aspects particularly relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions. We focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specication in a coherent way

Trust negotiation policy management for service-oriented applications

Service-oriented architectures (SOA), and in particular Web services, have quickly become a popular technology to connect applications both within and across enterprise boundaries. However, as services are increasingly used to implement critical functionality, security has become an important concern impeding the widespread adoption of SOA. Trust negotiation is an approach to access control that may be applied in scenarios where service requesters are often unknown in advance, such as for services available via the public Internet. Rather than relying on requesters' identities, trust negotiation makes access decisions based on the level of trust established between the requester and the provider in a negotiation, during which the parties exchange credentials, which are signed assertions that describe some attributes of the owner. However, managing the evolution of trust negotiation policies is a difficult problem that has not been sufficiently addressed to date. Access control policies have a lifecycle, and they are revised based on applicable business policies. Additionally, because a trust relationship established in a trust negotiation may be long lasting, their evolution must also be managed. Simply allowing a negotiation to continue according to an old policy may be undesirable, especially if new important constraints have been added. In this thesis, we introduce a model-driven trust negotiation framework for service-oriented applications. The framework employs a model for trust negotiation, based on state machines, that allows automated generation of the control structures necessary to enforce trust negotiation policies from the visual model of the policy. Our policy model also supports lifecycle management. We provide sets of operations to modify policies and to manage ongoing negotiations, and operators for identifying and managing impacts of changes to trust negotiation policies on ongoing trust negotiations. The framework presented in the thesis has been implemented in the Trust-Serv prototype, which leverages industry specifications such as WS-Security and WS-Trust to offer a container-centric mechanism for deploying trust negotiation that is transparent to the services being protected

KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology for Negotiating Agent Development

Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of: (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardised components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, since these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents(especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system