Information-based agency

Successful negotiators look beyond a purely utilitarian view. We propose a new agent architecture that integrates the utilitarian, information, and semantic views allowing the definition of strategies that take these three dimensions into account. Information-based agency values the information in dialogues in the context of a communication language based on a structured ontology and on the notion of commitment. This abstraction unifies measures such as trust, reputation, and reliability in a single framework

Information-based Deliberation

Information-based agency is founded on two observations: everything in an agent's world model is uncertain, and everything that an agent communicates gives away valuable information. The agent's deliberative mechanism manages interaction using plans and strategies in the context of the relationships the agent has with other agents, and is the means by which those relationships develop

Information-Based Planning and Strategies

The foundations of information-based agency are described, and the principal architectural components are introduced. The agents deliberative planning mechanism manages interaction using plans and strategies in the context of the relationships the agent has with other agents, and is the means by which those relationships develop. Finally strategies are described that employ the deliberative mechanism and manage argumentative dialogues with the aim of achieving the agents goals

An agent architecture for an uncertain world

Successful negotiators look beyond a purely utilitarian view. We propose a new agent architecture that was inspired by the observation that "Everything that an agent says gives away (valuable) information." It is intended for agents who are uncertain about their environment. Information-based agency uses tools from information theory, and includes techniques for managing information exchange including: the acceptance of contracts, the estimation of trust, reliability, honour and confidence. © 2008 IEEE

Dispute Resolution Using Argumentation-Based Mediation

Mediation is a process, in which both parties agree to resolve their dispute by negotiating over alternative solutions presented by a mediator. In order to construct such solutions, mediation brings more information and knowledge, and, if possible, resources to the negotiation table. The contribution of this paper is the automated mediation machinery which does that. It presents an argumentation-based mediation approach that extends the logic-based approach to argumentation-based negotiation involving BDI agents. The paper describes the mediation algorithm. For comparison it illustrates the method with a case study used in an earlier work. It demonstrates how the computational mediator can deal with realistic situations in which the negotiating agents would otherwise fail due to lack of knowledge and/or resources.Comment: 6 page

An argumentation system that builds trusted trading partnerships

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.In e-Commerce, a buying process typically begins with browsing the available products or services, and then selecting the ones that satisfy a given need. The next phase is negotiation to reach an agreement. If an agreement is signed between two parties, they enter into the enactment phase including payment and delivery. After that, they evaluate how well the products or services satisfy their needs. One of the reasons for dissatisfaction is that a trading agent does not know its opponent agent's needs, contract acceptance criteria, or behaviour during their interactions. This dissertation is concerned with the problems and challenges of repeatedly conducted trading activities in e-Commerce applications. Argumentation is a mode of interaction between agents that enables them to exchange information within messages in the form of arguments to explain their current position and future plans with the intention of increasing the chance of success in the negotiation. How an agent conducts all phases of a buying process through argumentation is an important research query. It becomes difficult to solve this query if an agent has to repeatedly conduct trading activities with its opponent agents. This work describes a novel solution to how an agent builds trusted trading partnerships with its opponent agents. The requirements of all phases of a buying process are specified by five models: the needs model, the opponent agent selection model, the communication model, the agreement model, and the relationship model. The relationship aware argumentation framework is then proposed. It integrates how the trading agents analyze their interaction history, exchanged information, and any promises made. An agent architecture is then developed that extends the idea of information based agency. It measures the strength of business relationships and predicts behavioural parameters from the history of interactions. This dissertation establishes the thesis statement, "Modelling the strength of relationships between agents and predicting the behaviour of trading partner agents in a multi agent argumentation system enables agents to build trusted trading partnerships". A prototype simulation environment has been developed to conduct the experiments and to validate the thesis statement. The simulated arrival rate obtained by the proposed model is lower than that of an existing model, e.g., the Trust and Honour model. The prototype argumentation system demonstrated a proof of concept. The prototype will be further developed before applying the proposed argumentation system in commercial applications

Agreement Computing

[EN] In this paper we introduce the concept of Agreement Computing, motivate the central role that the concept of agreement plays in open software systems and discuss a number of research challenges that need to be addressed to make the agreement computing vision a reality.Research supported by the Agreement Technologies CONSOLIDER project under contract CSD2007-0022 and INGENIO 2010 and by the Agreement Technologies COST Action, IC0801.Sierra Garcia, C.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Ossowski, DS. (2011). Agreement Computing. KI - Künstliche Intelligenz. 25(1):57-61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-010-0070-yS5761251Arcos JL, Esteva M, Noriega P, Rodríguez JA, Sierra C (2005) Engineering open environments with electronic institutions. Eng Appl Artif Intell 18(2):191–204Boella G, Noriega P, Pigozzi G, Verhagen H (2009) In: Dagstuhl seminar proceedings 09121: normative multi-agent systems.Henrik G, Wright V (1963) Norm and action, a logical enquiry. Routledge and Kegan Paul, LondonHermenegildo M, Albert E, López-García P, Puebla G (2005) Abstraction carrying code and resource-awareness. In: Principle and practice of declarative programming. ACM Press, New YorkJennings N, Faratin P, Lomuscio A, Parsons S, Sierra C, Wooldridge M (2001) Automated negotiation: prospects methods and challenges. Group Decis Negot 10(2):199–215Jøsang A, Ismail R, Boyd C (2007) A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision. Decis Support Syst 43(2):618–644Kalfoglou Y, Schorlemmer M (2003) IF-Map: an ontology-mapping method based on information-flow theory. In: Spaccapietra S, March S, Aberer K (eds) Journal on data semantics I. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 2800. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 98–127Ko RKL, Lee SSG, Lee EW (2009) Business process management (bpm) standards: a survey. Bus Process Manag J 15(5):744–791Kraus S (1997) Negotiation and cooperation in multi-agent environments. Artif Intell 94(1–2):79–97March J (1996) A preface to understanding how decisions happen in organizations. In: Organizational decision-making, Cambridge University Press, CambridgeNecula GC, Lee P (1996) Proof-carrying code. Tech repRoss A (1968) Directives and norms. Humanities, Atlantic HighlandsSierra C, Debenham J (2006) Trust and honour in information-based agency. In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems. ACM Press, New York, pp 1225–1232Simon HA Administrative behavior. Free Press (1997)Vasirani M, Ossowski S (2009) A market-inspired approach to reservation-based urban road traffic management. In: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, IFAAMAS, pp. 617–62

An agent model for business relationships

Relationships are fundamental to all but the most impersonal forms of interaction in business. An agent aims to secure projected needs by attempting to build a set of (business) relationships with other agents. A relationship is built by exchanging private information, and is characterised by its intimacy — degree of closeness — and balance — degree of fairness. Each argumentative interaction between two agents then has two goals: to satisfy some immediate need, and to do so in a way that develops the relationship in a desired direction. An agent’s desire to develop each relationship in a particular way then places constraints on the argumentative utterances. This paper describes argumentative interaction constrained by a desire to develop such relationships.Peer Reviewe

Smart communications network management through a synthesis of distributed intelligence and information

Demands on communications networks to support bundled, interdependent communications services (data, voice, video) are increasing in complexity. Smart network management techniques are required to meet this demand. Such management techniques are envisioned to be based on two main technologies: (i) embedded intelligence; and (ii) up-to-the-millisecond delivery of performance information. This paper explores the idea of delivery of intelligent network management as a synthesis of distributed intelligence and information, obtained through information mining of network performance. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing

A map of trust between trading partners

A pair of 'trust maps' give a fine-grained view of an agent's accumulated, time-discounted belief that the enactment of commitments by another agent will be in-line with what was promised, and that the observed agent will act in a way that respects the confidentiality of previously passed information. The structure of these maps is defined in terms of a categorisation of utterances and the ontology. Various summary measures are then applied to these maps to give a succinct view of trust. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008