Agreement Technologies - Negotiation
Agreement technologies aim at developing techniques that enable software components to reach agreements on the mutual performance of services, hence supporting the development of large-scale, open distributed systems. Hence, agreement technologies propose a new paradigm for next generation distributed systems. The new paradigm is structured around the concept of agreement between computational agents. These agreements must be consistent with the normative context where they are established and permit, once accepted, that agents call for mutual services and honour them. An entity, by the fact of being autonomous, may choose whether to fulfil an agreement or not, and it should fulfil them when there is an obligation to do so derived from the standing agreements. Autonomy, interaction, mobility and openness are the characteristics that the paradigm covers from a theoretical and practical perspective. We have identified negotiation, semantic alignment and trust as the key enabling agreement technologies.
- Negotiation techniques allow agents to reach agreements on the terms of their interactions.
- Semantic alignment techniques allow agents using different ontologies to understand one another.
- Trust is the technology that complements traditional security mechanisms by relying on social mechanisms that interpret the behaviour of agents.
Agents are computer programs that have: autonomy, they chose their course of action without human intervention; proactiveness, they pursue their own goals; and reactiveness, perceive their environment and react to sudden changes on it. We have been working on the social aspects of agents when they interact through dialogues, in the area of automated negotiation. We have developed:
- Infrastructures for agent mediated auction houses, that is, virtual places on the network where agents meet to sell and buy goods acording to particular auction protocols.
- Techniques for agent mediation when the dialogue between agents corresponds to a multi-issue negotiation protocol.
- Reputation measures as a mean to evaluate the credibility of agents when engaging on negotiation.
- Argumentation techniques as a means for negotiation, that is, to complement offers and counteroffers on negotiation with promises, threats or enticements of different sorts, in order to persuade the others about a particular course of action.
- Agreement Technologies01/09/2007 - 31/08/2012
This project proposes a new paradigm for next generation distributed systems. The new paradigm will be structured around the concept of agreement between computational agents. These agreements must be consistent with the normative context where they are established and will permit, once accepted, that the agents call for mutual services and honour them.
An entity, by the fact of being autonomous, may choose whether to fulfil an agreement or not, and it should fulfil them when there is an obligation to do so derived from the standing agreements. Autonomy, interaction, mobility and openness are the characteristics that the paradigm will cover from a theoretical and practical perspective. Semantic alignment, negotiation, argumentation, virtual organizations, learning, real time, and several other technologies will be in the sandbox to define, specify and verify such systems. Both functional and non-functional properties will be studied. Security on execution will be based on trust and reputation measures. These measures will help in the decision making of the agents to determine with whom to interact and what terms and conditions to accept. Virtual worlds technology will be explored to give high usability to the tools. Scalability will be guaranteed by the design of new algorithms for semantic alignment and through the use of electronic institutions.
The project will also build algorithms, software platforms and three demonstrators on electronic procurement, mobile health and water conflict resolution.
UDT-IA Project: - It is all about me. Anthropomorphised Trading in Believable Electronic Markets01/01/2008 - 31/12/2010
There is a need for trustful business environments that will open up the emarkets to a greater population of traders. This project looks at the development of believable emarkets that address this need. Proposed 3D electronic institution technology is expected to facilitate the establishment of robust business structures as the believability of the business activities and interactions in such emarkets will ensure the principles of trust and reputation in the electronic markets of tomorrow.
Administering organisation: University of Technology, Sydney
Participants: Prof SJ Simoff; Prof JK Debenham; Prof C Sierra; Prof IF Wilkinson
