Investigating adaptive, confidence-based strategic negotiations in complex multiagent environments

We propose an adaptive 1-to-many negotiation strategy for multiagent coalition formation in complex environments that are dynamic, uncertain, and real-time. Our strategy deals with how to assign multiple issues to a set of concurrent negotiations based on an initiating agent’s confidence in its profiling of its peer agents. When an agent is confident, it uses a packaged approach—conducting multiple multi-issue negotiations—with its peers. Otherwise, it uses a pipelined approach—conducting multiple single-issue negotiations—with its peers. The initiating agent is also capable of using both approaches in a hybrid, dealing with a mixed group of responding peers. An agent’s confidence in its profile or view of another agent is crucial, and that depends on the environment in which the agents operate. To evaluate the proposed strategy, we use a coalition formation framework in a complex environment. Results show that the proposed strategy outperforms the purely pipelined strategy and the purely packaged strategy in both efficiency and effectiveness

An Evolutionary Learning Approach for Adaptive Negotiation Agents

Developing effective and efficient negotiation mechanisms for real-world applications such as e-Business is challenging since negotiations in such a context are characterised by combinatorially complex negotiation spaces, tough deadlines, very limited information about the opponents, and volatile negotiator preferences. Accordingly, practical negotiation systems should be empowered by effective learning mechanisms to acquire dynamic domain knowledge from the possibly changing negotiation contexts. This paper illustrates our adaptive negotiation agents which are underpinned by robust evolutionary learning mechanisms to deal with complex and dynamic negotiation contexts. Our experimental results show that GA-based adaptive negotiation agents outperform a theoretically optimal negotiation mechanism which guarantees Pareto optimal. Our research work opens the door to the development of practical negotiation systems for real-world applications

Multi agent system for negotiation in supply chain management

Supply chain management (SCM) is an emerging field that has commanded attention and support from the industrial community. Supply chain (SC) is defined as the chain linking each entity of the manufacturing and supply process from raw materials through to the end user. In order to increase supply chain effectiveness, minimize total cost, and reduce the bullwhip effect, integration and coordination of different systems and processes in the supply chain are required using information technology and effective communication and negotiation mechanism. To solve this problem, Agent technology provides the distributed environment a great promise of effective communication. The agent technology facilitates the integration of the entire supply chain as a networked system of independent echelon. In this article, a multi agent system has been developed to simulate a multi echelon supply chain. Each entity is modeled as one agent and their coordination lead to control inventories and minimize the total cost of SC by sharing information and forecasting knowledge and using negotiation mechanism. The result showed a reasonable reduction in total cost and bullwhip effect

Investigating adaptive, confidence-based strategic negotiations in complex multiagent environments

We propose an adaptive 1-to-many negotiation strategy for multiagent coalition formation in complex environments that are dynamic, uncertain, and real-time. Our strategy deals with how to assign multiple issues to a set of concurrent negotiations based on an initiating agent’s confidence in its profiling of its peer agents. When an agent is confident, it uses a packaged approach—conducting multiple multi-issue negotiations—with its peers. Otherwise, it uses a pipelined approach—conducting multiple single-issue negotiations—with its peers. The initiating agent is also capable of using both approaches in a hybrid, dealing with a mixed group of responding peers. An agent’s confidence in its profile or view of another agent is crucial, and that depends on the environment in which the agents operate. To evaluate the proposed strategy, we use a coalition formation framework in a complex environment. Results show that the proposed strategy outperforms the purely pipelined strategy and the purely packaged strategy in both efficiency and effectiveness

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

SOLACE: A framework for electronic negotiations

Copyright @ 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbHMost existing frameworks for electronic negotiations today are tied to specific negotiation systems for which they were developed, preventing them from being applied to other negotiation scenarios. Thus, the evaluation of electronic negotiation systems is difficult as each one is based on a different framework. Additionally, each developer has to design a new framework for any system to be developed, leading to a ‘reinvention of the wheel’. This paper presents SOLACE—a generic framework for multi-issue negotiations, which can be applied to a variety of negotiation scenarios. In contrast with other frameworks for electronic negotiations, SOLACE supports hybrid systems in which the negotiation participants can be humans, agents or a combination of the two. By recognizing the importance of strategies in negotiations and incorporating a time attribute in negotiation proposals, SOLACE enhances existing approaches and provides a foundation for the flexible electronic negotiation systems of the future