Negotiation in multi-agent systems

  • Authors:

  • Martin Beer;Mark D'inverno;Michael Luck;Nick Jennings;Chris Preist;Michael Schroeder

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Liverpool University, UK;Cavendish School of Computer Science, University of Westminster, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK;Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, UK;Agent Technology Group, Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, UK;Department of Computer Science, City University, UK

  • Venue:
  • The Knowledge Engineering Review
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

In systems composed of multiple autonomous agents, negotiation is a key form of interaction that enables groups of agents to arrive at a mutual agreement regarding some belief, goal or plan, for example. Particularly because the agents are autonomous and cannot be assumed to be benevolent, agents must influence others to convince them to act in certain ways, and negotiation is thus critical for managing such inter-agent dependencies. The process of negotiation may be of many different forms, such as auctions, protocols in the style of the contract net, and argumentation, but it is unclear just how sophisticated the agents or the protocols for interaction must be for successful negotiation in different contexts. All these issues were raised in the panel session on negotiation.