Negotiation in Multi-Agent Systems

In systems composed of multiple autonomous agents, negotiation is a key form of interaction that enables groups of agents to arrive at a mutual agreement regarding some belief, goal or plan, for example. Particularly because the agents are autonomous and cannot be assumed to be benevolent, agents must influence others to convince them to act in certain ways, and negotiation is thus critical for managing such inter-agent dependencies. The process of negotiation may be of many different forms, such as auctions, protocols in the style of the contract net, and argumentation, but it is unclear just how sophisticated the agents or the protocols for interaction must be for successful negotiation in different contexts. All these issues were raised in the panel session on negotiation

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues

A language for information commerce processes

Automatizing information commerce requires languages to represent the typical information commerce processes. Existing languages and standards cover either only very specific types of business models or are too general to capture in a concise way the specific properties of information commerce processes. We introduce a language that is specifically designed for information commerce. It can be directly used for the implementation of the processes and communication required in information commerce. It allows to cover existing business models that are known either from standard proposals or existing information commerce applications on the Internet. The language has a concise logical semantics. In this paper we present the language concepts and an implementation architecture

Multi Agent Systems in Logistics: A Literature and State-of-the-art Review

Based on a literature survey, we aim to answer our main question: “How should we plan and execute logistics in supply chains that aim to meet today’s requirements, and how can we support such planning and execution using IT?†Today’s requirements in supply chains include inter-organizational collaboration and more responsive and tailored supply to meet specific demand. Enterprise systems fall short in meeting these requirements The focus of planning and execution systems should move towards an inter-enterprise and event-driven mode. Inter-organizational systems may support planning going from supporting information exchange and henceforth enable synchronized planning within the organizations towards the capability to do network planning based on available information throughout the network. We provide a framework for planning systems, constituting a rich landscape of possible configurations, where the centralized and fully decentralized approaches are two extremes. We define and discuss agent based systems and in particular multi agent systems (MAS). We emphasize the issue of the role of MAS coordination architectures, and then explain that transportation is, next to production, an important domain in which MAS can and actually are applied. However, implementation is not widespread and some implementation issues are explored. In this manner, we conclude that planning problems in transportation have characteristics that comply with the specific capabilities of agent systems. In particular, these systems are capable to deal with inter-organizational and event-driven planning settings, hence meeting today’s requirements in supply chain planning and execution.supply chain;MAS;multi agent systems

Agent Based E-Market: Framework, Design, and Implementation

Attempt has been made to design and develop a complete adoptive Multi Agent System pertaining to merchant brokering stage of Customer Buying Behaviour Model with the intent of appropriate framework. Intelligent agents are autonomous entity which observe and act upon an environment. In general, they are software robots and vitally used in variety of e-Business applications. This paper focuses on the discussions on electronic markets and the adoptive role, which agents can play in information transformation for automating e-market transactions. It is proposed to develop a framework for agent-based electronic markets for buyers and sellers totally with the assistance of software agents.Agent Oriented e-Business, Agent Oriented e-Markets, Buyer/Seller Agents, Java, Multi Agent Systems

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

DR-NEGOTIATE - A System for Automated Agent Negotiation with Defeasible Logic-Based Strategies

This paper reports on a system for automated agent negotiation. It uses the JADE agent framework, and its major distinctive feature is the use of declarative negotiation strategies. The negotiation strategies are expressed in a declarative rules language, defeasible logic and are applied using the implemented defeasible reasoning system DR-DEVICE. The choice of defeasible logic is justified. The overall system architecture is described, and a particular negotiation case is presented in detail

A Configurable Matchmaking Framework for Electronic Marketplaces

E-marketplaces constitute a major enabler of B2B and B2C e-commerce activities. This paper proposes a framework for one of the central activities of e-marketplaces: matchmaking of trading intentions lodged by market participants. The framework identifies a core set of concepts and functions that are common to all types of marketplaces and can serve as the basis for describing the distinct styles of matchmaking employed within various market mechanisms. A prototype implementation of the framework based on Web services technology is presented, illustrating its ability to be dynamically configured to meet specific market needs and its potential to serve as a foundation for more fully fledged e-marketplace frameworks