Using Similarity Criteria to Make Negotiation Trade-Offs

This paper addresses the issues involved in software agents making trade-offs during automated negotiations in which they have information uncertainty and resource limitations. In particular, the importance of being able to make trade-offs in real-world applications is highlighted and a novel algorithm for performing trade-offs for multi-dimensional goods is developed. The algorithm uses the notion of fuzzy similarity in order to find negotiation solutions that are beneficial to both parties. Empirical results indicate the benefits and effectiveness of the trade-off algorithm in a range of negotiation situations

Automated Negotiation for Provisioning Virtual Private Networks Using FIPA-Compliant Agents

This paper describes the design and implementation of negotiating agents for the task of provisioning virtual private networks. The agents and their interactions comply with the FIPA specification and they are implemented using the FIPA-OS agent framework. Particular attention is focused on the design and implementation of the negotiation algorithms

Autonomous Agents for Business Process Management

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However, since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore, a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our system to a real-world problem faced by British Telecom

Using Intelligent Agents to Manage Business Processes

This paper describes work undertaken in the ADEPT (Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks) project towards developing an agent-based infrastructure for managing business processes. We describe how the key technology of negotiating, service providing, autonomous agents was realised and demonstrate how this was applied to the BT business process of providing a customer quote for network services

The Growing Complexity of Internet Interconnection

End-to-End (E2E) packet delivery in the Internet is achieved through a system of interconnections between heterogeneous entities called Autonomous Systems (ASes). The initial pattern of AS interconnection in the Internet was relatively simple, involving mainly ISPs with a balanced mixture of inbound and outbound traffic. Changing market conditions and industrial organization of the Internet have jointly forced interconnections and associated contracts to become significantly more diverse and complex. The diversity of interconnection contracts is significant because efficient allocation of costs and revenues across the Internet value chain impacts the profitability of the industry. Not surprisingly, the challenges of recovering the fixed and usage-sensitive costs of network transport give rise to more complex settlements mechanisms than the simple bifurcated (transit and peering) model described in many earlier analyses of Internet interconnection (see BESEN et al., 2001; GREENSTEIN, 2005; or LAFFONT et al., 2003). In the following, we provide insight into recent operational developments, explaining why interconnection in the Internet has become more complex, the nature of interconnection bargaining processes, the implications for cost/revenue allocation and hence interconnection incentives, and what this means for public policy. This paper offers an abbreviated version of the original paper (see FARATIN et al., 2007b).internet interconnection, economics, public policy, routing, peering.

Implementing a Business Process Management System Using ADEPT: A Real-World Case Study

This article describes how the agent-based design of ADEPT (advanced decision environment for processed tasks) and implementation philosophy was used to prototype a business process management system for a real-world application. The application illustrated is based on the British Telecom (BT) business process of providing a quote to a customer for installing a network to deliver a specified type of telecommunication service. Particular emphasis is placed upon the techniques developed for specifying services, allowing heterogeneous information models to interoperate, allowing rich and flexible interagent negotiation to occur, and on the issues related to interfacing agent-based systems and humans. This article builds upon the companion article (Applied Artificial Intelligence Vol.14, no 2, pgs. 145-189) that provides details of the rationale and design of the ADEPT technology deployed in this application

An Evolutionary Learning Approach for Adaptive Negotiation Agents

Developing effective and efficient negotiation mechanisms for real-world applications such as e-Business is challenging since negotiations in such a context are characterised by combinatorially complex negotiation spaces, tough deadlines, very limited information about the opponents, and volatile negotiator preferences. Accordingly, practical negotiation systems should be empowered by effective learning mechanisms to acquire dynamic domain knowledge from the possibly changing negotiation contexts. This paper illustrates our adaptive negotiation agents which are underpinned by robust evolutionary learning mechanisms to deal with complex and dynamic negotiation contexts. Our experimental results show that GA-based adaptive negotiation agents outperform a theoretically optimal negotiation mechanism which guarantees Pareto optimal. Our research work opens the door to the development of practical negotiation systems for real-world applications

Acceptance conditions in automated negotiation

In every negotiation with a deadline, one of the negotiating parties has to accept an offer to avoid a break off. A break off is usually an undesirable outcome for both parties, therefore it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When designing such conditions one is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the current offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between automated agents and by the results and insights of the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC), we classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We focus on decoupled acceptance conditions, i.e. conditions that do not depend on the bidding strategy that is used. We performed extensive experiments to compare the performance of acceptance conditions in combination with a broad range of bidding strategies and negotiation domains. Furthermore we propose new acceptance conditions and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions that we study. In particular, it is shown that they outperform the standard acceptance condition of comparing the current offer with the offer the agent is ready to send out. We also provide insight in to why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation environment and the efficacy of acceptance condition

Arguing and negotiating in the presence of social influences

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