An agent negotiation engine for collaborative decision making

Abstract

Negotiation engines are major components of autonomous agents, because negotiation is one of the most important types of agent interaction. Thus far, most negotiation engines rely on analytic techniques to maximize the social welfare of agent communities. Such engines are developed with total disregard of the possibility of enabling agents to analyze offers made by their negotiation opponents. The analysis of the offers leads to making tradeoffs that result into agreeing on (selecting) solution options that maximize the social welfare of the negotiation agents. Therefore, this paper presents an agent negotiation engine that supports the following: evaluation of solution options, analysis of tradeoffs, analysis of offers, and management of negotiation deadlocks. Moreover, the paper presents a simulation experiment that illustrates the capabilities of the negotiation engine. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.