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

Modelling Trust, Honour and Reliability in Business Relationships

Successful negotiators prepare by determining their position along five dimensions: Legitimacy, Options, Goals, Independence, and Commitment. We model business relationships in terms of these dimensions and two primitive concepts: intimacy (degree of closeness) and balance (degree of fairness). The intimacy is a pair of matrices that evaluate both an agentï½s contribution to the relationship and its opponentï½s contribution each from an information view and from a utilitarian view across the five dimensions. The balance is the difference between these matrices. A relationship strategy maintains a target intimacy for each relationship that an agent would like the relationship to move towards in future. The negotiation strategy maintains a set of Options that are in-line with the current intimacy level, and then tactics wrap the Options in argumentation with the aim of attaining a successful deal and manipulating the successive negotiation balances towards the target intimacy

Evaluating exploitation versus exploitation by simulation

A general simulation model of market competition is de veloped to explore the effectiveness of and interactions be tween different types product exploration and exploitation strategies i.e. innovation, imitation and process improve ment. The model, like real markets, is highly non-linear such that analytical solutions are not possible. We use sim ulation experiments to examine ?rm survival and the effec tiveness of different strategy mixes and show how these. depend on the length of time it takes for each strategy to bear fruit, the speed of new product diffusion and the du ration of product life cycles. The model is freely available on the Internet and provides the basis for further experi ments to examine the impact of different combinations of ?rm strategies on survival and performance

Automating Contract Negotiation

The automation of contract negotiation requires intelligent agents that can assimilate and use real-time information flows wisely. Electronic markets are information-rich with access to the Internet and the World Wide Web. A new breed o

Intelligent agents for multi-issue auctions and bidding

An approach to auctions and bidding is founded on observations and expectations of the opponents' behavior and not on assumptions concerning the opponents' motivations or internal reasoning. The approach draws ideas from information theory. A bidding ag

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

Validation of Two Distributed, Autonomous Self-Organisation Algorithms for 802.11 Mesh Networks by Simulation

Two algorithms in a "self-organisation of multi-radio mesh networks" project are described and validated by simulation. As they are to be deployed over large networks the two challenges have been the scalability and stability of the solution. The basic approach is that of a distributed, light-weight, cooperative multiagent system that guarantees scalability. As the solution is distributed it is unsuitable to achieve any global optimisation goal --- in any case, we argue that global optimisation of mesh network performance in any significant sense is not feasible in real situations that are subjected to unanticipated perturbations and external intervention. Our overall goal is simply to reduce maintenance costs for such networks by removing the need for humans to tune the network settings. So stability of the algorithms is our main concern