RESEARCH ON NEGOTIATION

Internet continues to grow at a very high pace. This growth is offering plenty of oportunities to apply Artificial Intelligence techniques to solve the many new, and old, problems to understand and manage the 'global computer' -consisting of milions of small distributed computers- associated to the network.

One of the basic needs of human users when approaching this vast computing machinery is that of mediation. Information changes and grows- constantly, business opportunities appear and disappear over thenetwork at lightspeed, the network itself is, of course, dynamic. Therefore, human beings are incapable of obtaining profit from the network without the help of 'intelligent' tools to intermediate. The IIIA has been working at this edge providing solutions by means of intelligent agents and infrastructures for multiagent systems.

Agents are understood as computer programs that have several characteristics: autonomous, they chose their course of action without human intervention, proactive, they pursue their own goals, and reactive, perceive their environment and react to sudden changes on it. These characteristics make agents the perfect candidates for helping humans on the interaction with huge networks of information. Another very important characteristics usually required on a program to be labelled as an agent is that of social awareness, that is, they are capable of recognising their peers -other agents- and establishing dialogues with them for the mutual benefit. This fact leads to the need for infrastructures for agents to dialogue. The IIIA has 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. In particular a tool called FM permits the creation of auction houses. This tool comes along with a series of agents programmed with different bidding strategies based on fuzzy logic. It is a free tool for academic purposes.

The IIIA has also developed techniques for agent mediation when the dialogue between agents corresponds to a multi-issue negotiation protocol. Diferent tactics for negotiation customizable by users have been developed and experimental results have been obtained about which parameter values are more adequate for certain types of environments. Also, the IIIA is making research on reputation measures as a mean to evaluate the credibility of agents when engaging on negotiation. Finally, new mediation protocols based on complex dialogical exchanges have been studied, mainly on argumentation as a means for negotiation, that is, to complement offers and counteroffers on negotiation with promises, theats or enticements of different sorts, in order to persuade the others about a particular course of action.


Papers

Sierra, P. Faratin, N. R. Jennings: A Service-Oriented Negotiation Model between Autonomous Agents, MAAMAW'97,Ronneby, Sweden. LNAI 1237, pp. 17-35.

ftp://ftp.elec.qmw.ac.uk/pub/isag/distributed-ai/publications/SierraFaratinJennings.ps.Z

Sierra, N. R. Jennings, P.Noriega, S. Parsons: A framework for argumentation-based negotiation. Intelligent Agents IV LNAI 1365, pp 177-192. (A summary in spanish to be published at Revista Iberoamericana de IA).

http://www.iiia.csic.es/Publications/1997/Argumentation.ps.Z

Noyda Matos, Carles Sierra: Evolutionary computing and negotiating agents, Proceedings of the Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Trading (AMET'98) , pp. 91-111. (paper75.ps.gz)

Noyda Matos, C. Sierra, Nick R. Jennings: Negotiation Strategies: An Evolutionary Approach, ICMAS98, pp. 182-189.

http://www.iiia.csic.es/~sierra/articles/ICMAS98/IcmasNoyda.ps

Peyman Faratin, C. Sierra, Nick R. Jennings: Negotiation decision functions for autonomous agents, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol 24, N 3-4, pp 159-182.

http://www.iiia.csic.es/~sierra/papers/inpress/negotiation-v2.ps

Simon Parsons, C. Sierra, Nick R. Jennings: Agents that reason and negotiate by arguing, Journal of Logic and Computation, Vol 8 N 3, pp 261-292.

http://www.iiia.csic.es/~sierra/papers/inpress/jlc.ps

S. Parsons, C. Sierra, N. Jennings: Multi-context Argumentative agents,Common Sense '98; The Fourth symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, pp. 298-349.

http://www.iiia.csic.es/~sierra/papers/inpress/cs.ps

N. R. Jennings, S. Parsons, P. Noriega, C. Sierra, On Argumentation-Based Negotiation, International Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems, MIT. (paper91.ps.gz)

J. Sabater, C. Sierra, S. Parsons, N. R. Jennings: Using multi-context systems to engineer executable agents, Proc. 6th Int.Workshop on Agent Theories Architectures and Languages (ATAL-99). Orlando, pp. 131-148. (paper100.ps.gz)


Revised version in: Intelligent Agents VI (eds N. R. Jennings and L. Lesperance) LNAI 1757 pages 277-294 (Also published at UKMAS 99 (the 2nd workshop of the UK special interest group on multi-agent systems)).


reduced version -in Catalan- at 2n Congrés Català d'Intel.ligència Artificial, Girona, pp. 185-191.

P. Faratin, N. Jennings, C. Sierra: Designing Responsive and Deliberative Automated Negotiators, Proc. AAAI Workshop on Negotiation: Settling Conflicts and Identifying

Opportunities. Orlando, pp. 12-18. (paper101.ps.gz)

C. Sierra, P. Faratin, N. R. Jennings: Deliberative Automated Negotiators Using Fuzzy Similarities, EUSFLAT 1999 Conference, Palma de Mallorca. pp. 155-158. (paper103.ps.gz)

N. Matos, C. Sierra: Fuzzy Components for Negotiating Agent Architectures, EUSFLAT 1999 Conference, Palma de Mallorca. pp. 151-154. (paper104.ps.gz)

P. Faratin, C. Sierra N. R. Jennings: Using similarity criteria to make negotiation trade-offs, ICMAS'00, pp. 119-126. (paper108.ps.gz)

P. Faratin, N. R. Jennings, P. Buckle, C. Sierra: Automated negotiation for provisioning virtual private networks using FIPA-compliant agents, PAAM'00. pp. 185-202. (paper109.ps.gz)

Jordi Sabater, Carles Sierra, Simon Parsons N. Jennings: Engineering executable agents using multi-context systems, Journal of Logic and Computation. (In-press)



Introductory papers



Slides

Invited talk for the SIKS day at Utrecht (13/10/00):

Agent-mediated Interaction. From Auctions to Negotiation and Argumentation.