An adaptive ontology-mediated approach to organize agent-based supply chain negotiation

Conference Theme: Soft Computing Techniques for Advanced Manufacturing and Service SystemsSession - MP-Fc Supply Chain Management & Logistics 3: cie181hk-1Effective supply chain management (SCM) comprises activities involving the demand and supply of resources and services. One important aspect of SCM is that companies in the supply chain may have to make decisions which are conflicting with the other partners. Negotiation is an essential approach to solve transaction and scheduling problems among supply chain members. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are being increasingly used in SCM applications. The advances in agent technology have provided the potential of automating supply chain negotiations to alleviate human interactions. This paper proposes an ontology-mediated approach to organize the agent-based supply chain negotiation and equip the agents with sophisticated negotiation knowledge. Firstly, a generic agent negotiation scheme is developed involving the agent intelligence modules, the knowledge representation method and the interaction behaviors. Then, the negotiation knowledge is structured through the usage of ontology, which performs as a hierarchical architecture as well as a descriptive language. The relationships between negotiation ontology concepts are defined through SWRL inference rules. Through this method, agents' negotiation behaviors will be more adaptive to various negotiation environments in accordance with different negotiation knowledge.published_or_final_versionThe 40th International Conference on Computers & Industrial Engineering (CIE40), Awaji City, Japan, 25-28 July 2010. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computers and Industrial Engineering, 2010, p. 1-

Proceedings of RSEEM 2006 : 13th Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets

Electronic markets have been a prominent topic of research for the past decade. Moreover, we have seen the rise but also the disappearance of many electronic marketplaces in practice. Today, electronic markets are a firm component of inter-organisational exchanges and can be observed in many branches. The Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets is an annual conference bringing together researchers working on various topics concerning electronic markets in research and practice. The focus theme of the13th Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets (RSEEM 2006) was ?Evolution in Electronic Markets?. Looking back at more than 10 years of research activities in electronic markets, the evolution can be well observed. While electronic commerce activities were based largely on catalogue-based shopping, there are now many examples that go beyond pure catalogues. For example, dynamic and flexible electronic transactions such as electronic negotiations and electronic auctions are enabled. Negotiations and auctions are the basis for inter-organisational trade exchanges about services as well as products. Mass customisation opens up new opportunities for electronic markets. Multichannel electronic commerce represents today?s various requirements posed on information and communication technology as well as on organisational structures. In recent years, service-oriented architectures of electronic markets have enabled ICT infrastructures for supporting flexible e-commerce and e-market solutions. RSEEM 2006 was held at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany in September 2006. The proceedings show a variety of approaches and include the selected 8 research papers. The contributions cover the focus theme through conceptual models and systems design, application scenarios as well as evaluation research approaches

Power and negotiation between different cultures presenting a decision-making tool

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 40-41).The first step in negotiation is the information gathering and investigation, very often the investigation stage is not done properly, the negotiator has to decide about the goals, which information he can share, need to determine the BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement), learn about the person/team he will be negotiation with. In additional there are also differences in how people from different cultures use information and communicate during the negotiation, ignoring the culture differences can be major mistake. This research evaluate the option of using decision-making negotiation tool for the investigation stage and for negotiation process, the thesis provides design and features set for tool based on research done and feedback from potential users, the paper illustrate the negotiation culture differences between American and Israelis, and how it should be embedded in tool. Survey and interviews concluded to collect feedback from people in different industries, on culture differences between American and Israelis and on how negotiators are interested in tool for negotiation. Finally, results analyzed to determine future actions, consider culture differences and user's need for negotiation tool.by Omer Granot.S.M

Performance Evaluation - Annual Report Year 3

This report describes the work done and results obtained in third year of the CATNETS project. Experiments carried out with the different configurations of the prototype are reported and simulation results are evaluated with the CATNETS metrics framework. The applicability of the Catallactic approach as market model for service and resource allocation in application layer networks is assessed based on the results and experience gained both from the prototype development and simulations. --Grid Computing

The effects of interplay between negotiation tactics and task complexity in software agent to human negotiations

Modern networked business environment enables design of flexible and effective mechanisms of exchange between economic parties. Online negotiations allow geographically and temporally separated participants to engage in exchange of offers in search for acceptable agreements. The digital medium enables development of software agents, which can assist with negotiation tasks while saving time and human effort. The current paper investigates the prospects of utilizing software agents in negotiations with the human counterparts. It presents the findings from experiment where human subjects acted as buyers negotiating with software agent sellers over a mobile phone plan. An electronic negotiation system incorporating software agents was used in the experiment. The agents employed various concession-making schedules while engaging in negotiation tasks involving one of two complexity levels. Negotiation task complexity was manipulated using different number of issues involved in the negotiations. Subjects were recruited among university students. Negotiations between the subjects and agents took place during a two-day period in an asynchronous mode through the web. The findings suggest that interaction between negotiation task complexity and negotiation tactic has significant effects on negotiation outcomes and subjective assessments by the human participants. In particular, task complexity had a higher impact on the agreement rate when agents employed a competitive tactic vs. when they used a conceding one

Automated Negotiation for Complex Multi-Agent Resource Allocation

The problem of constructing and analyzing systems of intelligent, autonomous agents is becoming more and more important. These agents may include people, physical robots, virtual humans, software programs acting on behalf of human beings, or sensors. In a large class of multi-agent scenarios, agents may have different capabilities, preferences, objectives, and constraints. Therefore, efficient allocation of resources among multiple agents is often difficult to achieve. Automated negotiation (bargaining) is the most widely used approach for multi-agent resource allocation and it has received increasing attention in the recent years. However, information uncertainty, existence of multiple contracting partners and competitors, agents\u27 incentive to maximize individual utilities, and market dynamics make it difficult to calculate agents\u27 rational equilibrium negotiation strategies and develop successful negotiation agents behaving well in practice. To this end, this thesis is concerned with analyzing agents\u27 rational behavior and developing negotiation strategies for a range of complex negotiation contexts. First, we consider the problem of finding agents\u27 rational strategies in bargaining with incomplete information. We focus on the principal alternating-offers finite horizon bargaining protocol with one-sided uncertainty regarding agents\u27 reserve prices. We provide an algorithm based on the combination of game theoretic analysis and search techniques which finds agents\u27 equilibrium in pure strategies when they exist. Our approach is sound, complete and, in principle, can be applied to other uncertainty settings. Simulation results show that there is at least one pure strategy sequential equilibrium in 99.7% of various scenarios. In addition, agents with equilibrium strategies achieved higher utilities than agents with heuristic strategies. Next, we extend the alternating-offers protocol to handle concurrent negotiations in which each agent has multiple trading opportunities and faces market competition. We provide an algorithm based on backward induction to compute the subgame perfect equilibrium of concurrent negotiation. We observe that agents\u27 bargaining power are affected by the proposing ordering and market competition and for a large subset of the space of the parameters, agents\u27 equilibrium strategies depend on the values of a small number of parameters. We also extend our algorithm to find a pure strategy sequential equilibrium in concurrent negotiations where there is one-sided uncertainty regarding the reserve price of one agent. Third, we present the design and implementation of agents that concurrently negotiate with other entities for acquiring multiple resources. Negotiation agents are designed to adjust 1) the number of tentative agreements and 2) the amount of concession they are willing to make in response to changing market conditions and negotiation situations. In our approach, agents utilize a time-dependent negotiation strategy in which the reserve price of each resource is dynamically determined by 1) the likelihood that negotiation will not be successfully completed, 2) the expected agreement price of the resource, and 3) the expected number of final agreements. The negotiation deadline of each resource is determined by its relative scarcity. Since agents are permitted to decommit from agreements, a buyer may make more than one tentative agreement for each resource and the maximum number of tentative agreements is constrained by the market situation. Experimental results show that our negotiation strategy achieved significantly higher utilities than simpler strategies. Finally, we consider the problem of allocating networked resources in dynamic environment, such as cloud computing platforms, where providers strategically price resources to maximize their utility. While numerous auction-based approaches have been proposed in the literature, our work explores an alternative approach where providers and consumers negotiate resource leasing contracts. We propose a distributed negotiation mechanism where agents negotiate over both a contract price and a decommitment penalty, which allows agents to decommit from contracts at a cost. We compare our approach experimentally, using representative scenarios and workloads, to both combinatorial auctions and the fixed-price model, and show that the negotiation model achieves a higher social welfare

E-Negotiation systems: A theoretical framework and empirical investigation

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Negotiation-Style Recommender Based on Computational Ecology in Open Negotiation Environments.

The system described herein represents the first example of a recommender system in digital ecosystems where agents negotiate services on behalf of small companies. The small companies compete not only with price or quality, but with a wider service-by-service composition by subcontracting with other companies. The final result of these offerings depends on negotiations at the scale of millions of small companies. This scale requires new platforms for supporting digital business ecosystems, as well as related services like open-id, trust management, monitors and recommenders. This is done in the Open Negotiation Environment (ONE), which is an open-source platform that allows agents, on behalf of small companies, to negotiate and use the ecosystem services, and enables the development of new agent technologies. The methods and tools of cyber engineering are necessary to build up Open Negotiation Environments that are stable, a basic condition for predictable business and reliable business environments. Aiming to build stable digital business ecosystems by means of improved collective intelligence, we introduce a model of negotiation style dynamics from the point of view of computational ecology. This model inspires an ecosystem monitor as well as a novel negotiation style recommender. The ecosystem monitor provides hints to the negotiation style recommender to achieve greater stability of an open negotiation environment in a digital business ecosystem. The greater stability provides the small companies with higher predictability, and therefore better business results. The negotiation style recommender is implemented with a simulated annealing algorithm at a constant temperature, and its impact is shown by applying it to a real case of an open negotiation environment populated by Italian companies.Fil: De La Rosa, Josep Lluis. Universidad de Girona; EspañaFil: Hormazábal, Nicolás. Universidad de Girona; EspañaFil: Aciar, Silvana Vanesa. Universidad Nacional de San Juan; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Juan; ArgentinaFil: Lopardo, Gabriel Alejandro. Universidad de Girona; EspañaFil: Trias, Albert. Universidad de Girona; EspañaFil: Montaner, Miquel. No especifíca

Enhancing Agent Mediated Electronic Markets with Ontology Matching Services and Social Network Support

Os Mercados Eletrónicos atingiram uma complexidade e nível de sofisticação tão elevados, que tornaram inadequados os modelos de software convencionais. Estes mercados são caracterizados por serem abertos, dinâmicos e competitivos, e constituídos por várias entidades independentes e heterogéneas. Tais entidades desempenham os seus papéis de forma autónoma, seguindo os seus objetivos, reagindo às ocorrências do ambiente em que se inserem e interagindo umas com as outras. Esta realidade levou a que existisse por parte da comunidade científica um especial interesse no estudo da negociação automática executada por agentes de software [Zhang et al., 2011]. No entanto, a diversidade dos atores envolvidos pode levar à existência de diferentes conceptualizações das suas necessidades e capacidades dando origem a incompatibilidades semânticas, que podem prejudicar a negociação e impedir a ocorrência de transações que satisfaçam as partes envolvidas. Os novos mercados devem, assim, possuir mecanismos que lhes permitam exibir novas capacidades, nomeadamente a capacidade de auxiliar na comunicação entre os diferentes agentes. Pelo que, é defendido neste trabalho que os mercados devem oferecer serviços de ontologias que permitam facilitar a interoperabilidade entre os agentes. No entanto, os humanos tendem a ser relutantes em aceitar a conceptualização de outros, a não ser que sejam convencidos de que poderão conseguir um bom negócio. Neste contexto, a aplicação e exploração de relações capturadas em redes sociais pode resultar no estabelecimento de relações de confiança entre vendedores e consumidores, e ao mesmo tempo, conduzir a um aumento da eficiência da negociação e consequentemente na satisfação das partes envolvidas. O sistema AEMOS é uma plataforma de comércio eletrónico baseada em agentes que inclui serviços de ontologias, mais especificamente, serviços de alinhamento de ontologias, incluindo a recomendação de possíveis alinhamentos entre as ontologias dos parceiros de negociação. Este sistema inclui também uma componente baseada numa rede social, que é construída aplicando técnicas de análise de redes socias sobre informação recolhida pelo mercado, e que permite melhorar a recomendação de alinhamentos e auxiliar os agentes na sua escolha. Neste trabalho são apresentados o desenvolvimento e implementação do sistema AEMOS, mais concretamente: • É proposto um novo modelo para comércio eletrónico baseado em agentes que disponibiliza serviços de ontologias; • Adicionalmente propõem-se o uso de redes sociais emergentes para captar e explorar informação sobre relações entre os diferentes parceiros de negócio; • É definida e implementada uma componente de serviços de ontologias que é capaz de: • o Sugerir alinhamentos entre ontologias para pares de agentes; • o Traduzir mensagens escritas de acordo com uma ontologia em mensagens escritas de acordo com outra, utilizando alinhamentos previamente aprovados; • o Melhorar os seus próprios serviços recorrendo às funcionalidades disponibilizadas pela componente de redes sociais; • É definida e implementada uma componente de redes sociais que: • o É capaz de construir e gerir um grafo de relações de proximidade entre agentes, e de relações de adequação de alinhamentos a agentes, tendo em conta os perfis, comportamento e interação dos agentes, bem como a cobertura e utilização dos alinhamentos; • o Explora e adapta técnicas e algoritmos de análise de redes sociais às várias fases dos processos do mercado eletrónico. A implementação e experimentação do modelo proposto demonstra como a colaboração entre os diferentes agentes pode ser vantajosa na melhoria do desempenho do sistema e como a inclusão e combinação de serviços de ontologias e redes sociais se reflete na eficiência da negociação de transações e na dinâmica do mercado como um todo.In electronic commerce, the diversity of the involved actors can lead to different conceptualizations of their needs and capabilities, giving rise to semantic incompatibilities that might hamper negotiations and the fulfilling of satisfactory transactions. In order to provide help in conversation among different actors, markets must offer ontology services to facilitate interoperability. However, humans tend to be reluctant to accept others’ conceptualizations, except if they become convinced that a good deal can be achieved. In this context, the application and exploitation of relationships captured by social networks can result in the establishment of more accurate trust relationships between businesses and customers, as well as the improvement of the negotiation efficiency and therefore the users’ satisfaction with the electronic commerce system. The AEMOS system is an agent-based electronic commerce platform that provides ontology matching services in order to facilitate the interoperability between agents that use different ontologies. AEMOS also includes a social network component that allows improving the ontology alignment recommendations and supporting the agents’ decisions about which alignments to select based on the information collected throughout the market and by exploring social network analysis techniques. This work presents the development and implementation of the AEMOS system, illustrating how the collaboration between the different agents can be helpful in improving the system’s performance, and how the inclusion and combination of ontology services and social networks reflects in the efficiency of the negotiation process