An Agent Architecture for Concurrent Bilateral Negotiations

Abstract. We present an architecture that makes use of symbolic decision-making to support agents participating in concurrent bilateral negotiations. The architecture is a revised version of previous work with the KGP model [23, 12], which we specialise with knowledge about the agent’s self, the negotiation opponents and the environment. Our work combines the specification of domain-independent decision-making with a new protocol for concurrent negotiation that revisits the well-known alternating offers protocol [22]. We show how the decision-making can be specialised to represent the agent’s strategies, utilities and prefer-ences using a Prolog-like meta-program. The work prepares the ground for supporting decision-making in concurrent bilateral negotiations that is more lightweight than previous work and contributes towards a fully developed model of the architecture

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Concurrent Bilateral Negotiation

We present a novel negotiation model that allows an agent to learn how to negotiate during concurrent bilateral negotiations in unknown and dynamic e-markets. The agent uses an actor-critic architecture with model-free reinforcement learning to learn a strategy expressed as a deep neural network. We pre-train the strategy by supervision from synthetic market data, thereby decreasing the exploration time required for learning during negotiation. As a result, we can build automated agents for concurrent negotiations that can adapt to different e-market settings without the need to be pre-programmed. Our experimental evaluation shows that our deep reinforcement learning-based agents outperform two existing well-known negotiation strategies in one-to-many concurrent bilateral negotiations for a range of e-market settings

Negotiating Concurrently with Unknown Opponents in Complex, Real-Time Domains

We propose a novel strategy to enable autonomous agents to negotiate concurrently with multiple, unknown opponents in real-time, over complex multi-issue domains. We formalise our strategy as an optimisation problem, in which decisions are based on probabilistic information about the opponents' strategies acquired during negotiation. In doing so, we develop the first principled approach that enables the coordination of multiple, concurrent negotiation threads for practical negotiation settings. Furthermore, we validate our strategy using the agents and domains developed for the International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC), and we benchmark our strategy against the state-of-the-art. We find that our approach significantly outperforms existing approaches, and this difference improves even further as the number of available negotiation opponents and the complexity of the negotiation domain increases

A bargaining-specific architecture for supporting automated service agreement negotiation systems

The provision of services is often regulated by means of agreements that must be negotiated beforehand. Automating such negotiations is appealing insofar as it overcomes one of the most often cited shortcomings of human negotiation: slowness. Our analysis of the requirements of automated negotiation systems in open environments suggests that some of them cannot be tackled in a protocol-independent manner, which motivates the need for a protocol-specific architecture. However, current state-of-the-art bargaining architectures fail to address all of these requirements together. Our key contribution is a bargaining architecture that addresses all of the requirements we have identified. The definition of the architecture includes a logical view that identifies the key architectural elements and their interactions, a process view that identifies how the architectural elements can be grouped together into processes, a development view that includes a software framework that provides a reference implementation developers can use to build their own negotiation systems, and a scenarios view by means of which the architecture is illustrated and validatedComisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) SETI (TIN2009-07366)Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-2533 (Isabel)Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2010-21744-C02-1Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02602Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-4100Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008-04718-

A bargaining-specific architecture for supporting automated service agreement negotiation systems

The provision of services is often regulated by means of agreements that must be negotiated beforehand. Automating such negotiations is appealing insofar as it overcomes one of the most often cited shortcomings of human negotiation: slowness. Our analysis of the requirements of automated negotiation systems in open environments suggests that some of them cannot be tackled in a protocol-independent manner, which motivates the need for a protocol-specific architecture. However, current state-of-the-art bargaining architectures fail to address all of these requirements together. Our key contribution is a bargaining architecture that addresses all of the requirements we have identified. The definition of the architecture includes a logical view that identifies the key architectural elements and their interactions, a process view that identifies how the architectural elements can be grouped together into processes, a development view that includes a software framework that provides a reference implementation developers can use to build their own negotiation systems, and a scenarios view by means of which the architecture is illustrated and validatedComisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) SETI (TIN2009-07366)Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-2533 (Isabel)Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2010-21744-C02-1Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02602Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-4100Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008-04718-

Coordinating negotiations in data-intensive collaborative working environments using an agent-based model-driven platform

This paper tackles the interoperability problems of enterprise information systems by presenting a distributive model-driven platform for parallel coordination of multiple negotiations in data-intensive collaborative working environments. The proposed model was validated and verified by an industrial application scenario within the European research project H2020 C2NET (Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks). This real scenario developed data-intensive collaborative and cloud-enabled tools that allow the optimisation of the supply network of manufacturing SMEs, proposing a negotiation solution based on a model-driven interoperable decentralised architecture.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

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-

AGENT-BASED NEGOTIATION PLATFORM IN COLLABORATIVE NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT

This paper proposes an agent-based platform to model and support parallel and concurrent negotiations among organizations acting in the same industrial market. The underlying complexity is to model the dynamic environment where multi-attribute and multi-participant negotiations are racing over a set of heterogeneous resources. The metaphor Interaction Abstract Machines (IAMs) is used to model the parallelism and the non-deterministic aspects of the negotiation processes that occur in Collaborative Networked Environment

A negotiation approach to support interoperability in a collaborative manufacturing environment

Maintaining the interoperability in a dynamic competitive manufacturing environment in which different business enterprises collaborate is difficult to achieve. Our approach highlights negotiation as the best solution to solve interoperability problems by reaching the common decision suitable for all managers of various enterprises in the most optimized amount of time. In this context, this paper proposes a multi-agent negotiation model, able to coordinate several negotiations taking place in parallel among multiple participants. It is described the negotiation strategy for evaluating and generating offers and the protocol for sending the offers to the other agents. This model is being implemented in the H2020 C2NET project for supporting manufacturing.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio