68,558 research outputs found
Tasks for Agent-Based Negotiation Teams:Analysis, Review, and Challenges
An agent-based negotiation team is a group of interdependent agents that join
together as a single negotiation party due to their shared interests in the
negotiation at hand. The reasons to employ an agent-based negotiation team may
vary: (i) more computation and parallelization capabilities, (ii) unite agents
with different expertise and skills whose joint work makes it possible to
tackle complex negotiation domains, (iii) the necessity to represent different
stakeholders or different preferences in the same party (e.g., organizations,
countries, and married couple). The topic of agent-based negotiation teams has
been recently introduced in multi-agent research. Therefore, it is necessary to
identify good practices, challenges, and related research that may help in
advancing the state-of-the-art in agent-based negotiation teams. For that
reason, in this article we review the tasks to be carried out by agent-based
negotiation teams. Each task is analyzed and related with current advances in
different research areas. The analysis aims to identify special challenges that
may arise due to the particularities of agent-based negotiation teams.Comment: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 201
Reaching unanimous agreements within agent-based negotiation teams with linear and monotonic utility functions
[EN] In this article, an agent-based negotiation model for negotiation teams that negotiate a deal with an opponent is presented. Agent-based negotiation teams are groups of agents that join together as a single negotiation party because they share an interest that is related to the negotiation process. The model relies on a trusted mediator that coordinates and helps team members in the decisions that they have to take during the negotiation process: which offer is sent to the opponent, and whether the offers received from the opponent are accepted. The main strength of the proposed negotiation model is the fact that it guarantees unanimity within team decisions since decisions report a utility to team members that is greater than or equal to their aspiration levels at each negotiation round. This work analyzes how unanimous decisions are taken within the team and the robustness of the model against different types of manipulations. An empirical evaluation is also performed to study the impact of the different parameters of the model.This work is supported by TIN2008-04446, PROMETEO/2008/051, TIN2009-13839-C03-01, CSD2007-00022 of the Spanish government, and FPU Grant AP2008-00600 awarded to Victor Sanchez-Anguix. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor X. Wang.Sanchez-Anguix, V.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Botti, V.; García-Fornes, A. (2012). Reaching unanimous agreements within agent-based negotiation teams with linear and monotonic utility functions. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics. 42(3):778-792. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCB.2011.2177658S77879242
Studying the Impact of Negotiation Environments on Negotiation Teams' Performance
[EN] In this article we study the impact of the negotiation environment on the performance of several intra-team strategies (team dynamics) for agent-based negotiation teams that negotiate with an opponent. An agent-based negotiation team is a group of agents that joins together as a party because they share common interests in the negotiation at hand. It is experimentally shown how negotiation environment conditions like the deadline of both parties, the concession speed of the opponent, similarity among team members, and team size affect performance metrics like the minimum utility of team members, the average utility of team members, and the number of negotiation rounds. Our goal is identifying which intra-team strategies work better in different environmental conditions in order to provide useful knowledge for team members to select appropriate intra-team strategies according to environmental conditions.This work is supported by TIN2011-27652-C03-01, TIN2009-13839-C03-01, CSD2007-00022 of the Spanish Government, and FPU Grant AP2008-00600 awarded to Victor Sanchez-Anguix. We would also like to thank anonymous reviewers and assistants of AAMAS 2011 who helped us to improve our previous work, making this present work possible.Sanchez-Anguix, V.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Botti, V.; García-Fornes, A. (2013). Studying the impact of negotiation environments on negotiation teams' performance. Information Sciences. 219:17-40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2012.07.017S174021
Unanimously acceptable agreements for negotiation teams in unpredictable domains
A negotiation team is a set of agents with common and possibly also conflicting preferences that forms
one of the parties of a negotiation. A negotiation team is involved in two decision making processes
simultaneously, a negotiation with the opponents, and an intra-team process to decide on the moves
to make in the negotiation. This article focuses on negotiation team decision making for circumstances
that require unanimity of team decisions. Existing agent-based approaches only guarantee unanimity
in teams negotiating in domains exclusively composed of predictable and compatible issues. This article
presents a model for negotiation teams that guarantees unanimous team decisions in domains consisting
of predictable and compatible, and alsounpredictable issues. Moreover, the article explores the influence of
using opponent, and team member models in the proposing strategies that team members use. Experimental
results show that the team benefits if team members employ Bayesian learning to model their
teammates’ preferences.
2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This research is partially supported by TIN2012-36586-C03-01 of the Spanish government and PROMETEOII/2013/019 of Generalitat Valenciana. Other part of this research is supported by the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, applied science division of NWO and the Technology Program of the Ministry of Economic Affairs; the Pocket Negotiator Project with Grant No. VICI-Project 08075.Sánchez Anguix, V.; Aydogan, R.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Jonker, C. (2014). Unanimously acceptable agreements for negotiation teams in unpredictable domains. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. 13(4):243-265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2014.05.002S24326513
Negotiation Games: Acquiring Skills by Playing
This paper shows the research done at the School of Industrial Engineers (ETSII) of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), in two consecutive academic courses. In this negotiation game each team is formed by three students playing different roles, with a different degree of complexity. The game is played three different times changing the conditions and doing the Zones of Possible Agreement (ZOPA) smaller so the negotiation is going “harder” and it was more difficult for the team to achieve an agreement. Roles were distributed according to the student’s experience, since it was understood that difficulty of the roles was different, especially when there was set a time limit for negotiation. The combination of playing and training has shown that students without particularly good negotiating skills at the beginning of the experiment attained better final results than those who have natural negotiating skills, but no benefit of training
The first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010)
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
Multi-Agent Task Allocation in Complementary Teams: A Hunter and Gatherer Approach
Consider a dynamic task allocation problem, where tasks are unknowingly
distributed over an environment. This paper considers each task comprised of
two sequential subtasks: detection and completion, where each subtask can only
be carried out by a certain type of agent. We address this problem using a
novel nature-inspired approach called "hunter and gatherer". The proposed
method employs two complementary teams of agents: one agile in detecting
(hunters) and another skillful in completing (gatherers) the tasks. To minimize
the collective cost of task accomplishments in a distributed manner, a
game-theoretic solution is introduced to couple agents from complementary
teams. We utilize market-based negotiation models to develop incentive-based
decision-making algorithms relying on innovative notions of "certainty and
uncertainty profit margins". The simulation results demonstrate that employing
two complementary teams of hunters and gatherers can effectually improve the
number of tasks completed by agents compared to conventional methods, while the
collective cost of accomplishments is minimized. In addition, the stability and
efficacy of the proposed solutions are studied using Nash equilibrium analysis
and statistical analysis respectively. It is also numerically shown that the
proposed solutions function fairly, i.e. for each type of agent, the overall
workload is distributed equally.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure
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Adaptive use of task assignment models in team-based mobile business processes
Most mobile business processes are executed under uncertain and dynamic working environments. This makes the traditional centralized approach for the management of mobile tasks inappropriate to respond to the changes in working environment quickly as collecting the changing information from geographically distributed workforces in real time is expensive if not impossible. This raises the need of a distributed approach in the management of mobile tasks. This paper proposes a distributed architecture for team-based coordination support for mobile task management. In this architecture, tasks are managed via peer-to-peer style coordination between team members who have better understanding on the changing working environment than a centralised system. The novelty of the design of the architecture is explained by applying it to a real business process in the UK
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