On the integration of trust with negotiation, argumentation and semantics

Agreement Technologies are needed for autonomous agents to come to mutually acceptable agreements, typically on behalf of humans. These technologies include trust computing, negotiation, argumentation and semantic alignment. In this paper, we identify a number of open questions regarding the integration of computational models and tools for trust computing with negotiation, argumentation and semantic alignment. We consider these questions in general and in the context of applications in open, distributed settings such as the grid and cloud computing. © 2013 Cambridge University Press.This work was partially supported by the Agreement Technology COST action (IC0801). The authors would like to thank for helpful discussions and comments all participants in the panel on >Trust, Argumentation and Semantics> on 16 December 2009, Agia Napa, CyprusPeer Reviewe

An environment to support negotiation and contracting in collaborative networks

During the last years, manufacturing and service industries faced a global change in the production paradigm. They have to continuously adapt their operating principles in reaction to new business or collaboration opportunities, where a natural reaction is a shift to a new business paradigm with the creation of strategic alliances for product or services development, but also for innovative and emergent business services design. On one hand, the process of creating such alliances can be rather simple if organizations share the same geographical and cultural context. But on the other hand, considering different conditions, there might be a low success rate in the creation of successful consortia. One known reason for such low rate are the delays resulting from negotiations in the establishment of collaboration commitments, represented by contracts or agreements, which are crucial in the creation of such alliances. The collaborative networks discipline covers the study of networks of organizations specially when supported by computer networks. This thesis contributes with research in this field describing the creation process of virtual organizations, and proposing a negotiation support environment to help participants in the negotiation of the consortia creation process and in the co-design of new business services. A negotiation support environment is therefore proposed and described with its main requirements, adopted negotiation protocol, conceptual architecture, models, and software environment. To demonstrate the feasibility of the implementation of the proposed systems, a proof-ofconcept software prototype was implemented and tested using some specific scenarios. This thesis work has been validated adopting a methodology that includes: (i) validation in the research community; (ii) validation in a solar industry network; and (iii) validation by comparison analysis