A Rule-driven Approach for Defining the Behavior of Negotiating Software Agents

One problem with existing agent-mediated negotiation systems is that they rely on ad hoc, static, non-adaptive, and hardcoded schemes to represent the behaviour of agents. This limitation is probably due to the complexity of the negotiation task itself. Indeed, while negotiating, software (human) agents face tough decisions. These decisions are based not only on the information made available by the negotiation server, but on the behaviour of the other participants in the negotiation process as well. The information and the behaviour in question are constantly changing and highly uncertain. In the first part of the paper, we propose a rule-driven approach to represent, manage and explore negotiation strategies and coordination information. For that, we divide the behaviour of negotiating agents into protocols, strategies and coordination. Among the many advantages of the proposed solution, we can cite the high level of abstraction, the closeness to human understanding, the versatility, and the possibility to modify the agents' behaviour during the negotiation process. To validate our solution, we ran many agent tournaments, and used the rule-driven approach to implement bidding strategies that are common in the English and Dutch auctions. We also implemented simple coordination schemes across several auctions. The ongoing validation work is detailed and discussed in the second part of the paper. Un des inconvénients qu'on retrouve fréquemment dans les systèmes de négociation par agents est qu'ils reposent sur des schémas ad-hoc, non adaptatifs et figés dans le code pour représenter le comportement des agents. Cette limitation est probablement due à la complexité de l'activité de négociation elle-même. En effet, au cours de la négociation, les agents logiciels (humains) ont des décisions difficiles à prendre. Ces décisions ne sont pas seulement basées sur l'information disponible sur le serveur de négociation, mais aussi sur le comportement des autres participants durant le processus de négociation. L'information et le comportement en question changent constamment et sont très incertains. Dans la première partie de l'article, nous proposons une approche à base de règles pour représenter, gérer et explorer les stratégies de négociation ainsi que l'information de coordination. Parmi les nombreux avantages de la solution proposée, on peut citer le haut niveau d'abstraction, la proximité avec la compréhension humaine, la souplesse d'utilisation et la possibilité de modifier le comportement des agents durant le processus de négociation. Pour valider notre solution, nous avons effectué plusieurs tournois entre agents et utilisé l'approche à base de règles pour implémenter des stratégies simples applicables à l'enchère anglaise et à l'enchère hollandaise. Nous avons aussi implémenté des schémas simples de coordination impliquant plusieurs enchères. Le travail de validation, en cours, est détaillé et discuté dans la seconde partie de l'article.e-negotiation, online auction, software agent, negotiation strategy, coordination, rule-based system, rule engine, Négociation électronique, enchères en ligne, agents logiciels, stratégie de négociation, coordination, système à base de règles, moteur de règles

Machine Understandable Contracts with Deep Learning

This research investigates the automatic translation of contracts to computer understandable rules trough Natural Language Processing. The most challenging aspect, which is studied throughout this paper, is to understand the meaning of the contract and express it into a structured format. This problem can be reduced to the Named Entity Recognition and Rule Extraction tasks, the latter handles the extraction of terms and conditions. These two problems are difficult, but deep learning models can tackle them. We think that this paper is the first work to approach Rule Extraction with deep learning. This method is data-hungry, so the research also introduces data sets for these two tasks. Additionally, it contributes to the literature by introducing Law-Bert, a model based on BERT which is pre-trained on unlabelled contracts. The results obtained on Named Entity Recognition and Rule Extraction show that pre-training on contracts has a positive effect on performance for the downstream tasks

Toward Semantics-aware Representation of Digital Business Processes

An extended enterprise (EE) can be described by a set of models each representing a specific aspect of the EE. Aspects can for example be the process flow or the value description. However, different models are done by different people, which may use different terminology, which prevents relating the models. Therefore, we propose a framework consisting of process flow and value aspects and in addition a static domain model with structural and relational components. Further, we outline the usage of the static domain model to enable relating the different aspects

Global Trade Rules Access and Computational Law

Chapter 5 of the report "The promise of TradeTech: Policy approaches to harness trade digitalization". The report is co-published by the World Trade Organization and the World Economic Forum in April 2022 featuring WTI-affiliated drafters/coordinators, contributors, and reviewers (Jimena Sotelo, Craig Atkinson and Mira Burri). TradeTech - the set of technologies that enables global trade to become more efficient, inclusive and sustainable - plays an important role in easing the flow of goods across borders, reducing trade costs and creating new trade opportunities. This publication explores how international policy coordination, in particular the development of specific rules in trade agreements, could advance the adoption of digital technologies and trade digitalization across the world

Representing Business Contracts in RuleML

This paper presents an approach for the specification and implementation of translating contracts from a human-oriented form into an executable representation for monitoring. This will be done in the setting of RuleML. The task of monitoring contract execution and performance requires a logical account of deontic and defeasible aspects of legal language; currently such aspects are not covered by RuleML; accordingly we show how to extend it to cover such notions. From its logical form, the contract will be thus transformed into a machine readable rule notation and eventually implemented as executable semantics via any mark-up languages depending on the client's preference, for contract monitoring purposes

Data integration through service-based mediation for web-enabled information systems

The Web and its underlying platform technologies have often been used to integrate existing software and information systems. Traditional techniques for data representation and transformations between documents are not sufficient to support a flexible and maintainable data integration solution that meets the requirements of modern complex Web-enabled software and information systems. The difficulty arises from the high degree of complexity of data structures, for example in business and technology applications, and from the constant change of data and its representation. In the Web context, where the Web platform is used to integrate different organisations or software systems, additionally the problem of heterogeneity arises. We introduce a specific data integration solution for Web applications such as Web-enabled information systems. Our contribution is an integration technology framework for Web-enabled information systems comprising, firstly, a data integration technique based on the declarative specification of transformation rules and the construction of connectors that handle the integration and, secondly, a mediator architecture based on information services and the constructed connectors to handle the integration process

Interaction protocols for cross-organisational workflows

Workflow technologies are widely used in industry and commerce to assist in the specification, execution and completion of well defined processes within organisations. As industrial and commercial relations have evolved, based on advances on information and communications technologies, cross-organisational workflow integration has become an important issue. Since organisations can have very different workflows, the creation of compatible workflows so that organisations can collaborate and/or carry out mutual transactions automatically in an integrated fashion can be a very complex and time consuming process. As a consequence, the development of technologies to support the creation and execution of compatible workflows is a most relevant issue. In the present article we introduce the JamSession coordination platform as a tool to implement cross-organisational workflow integration. JamSession is declarative and based on algebraic specification methods, and therefore workflow integration implemented using this platform can profit from formal behavioural analysis, based on which desired features and properties can be verified and/or obtained