FIPA-Based Semi-centralized Protocol for Negotiation

Abstract

An important application of multi-agent systems is task negotiation. The existing protocols for controlling negotiation in multi-agent systems are either centralized or decentralized. The centralized protocols suffer from dependency on the central agent. If any problem occurs at the central agent, such as shutting down or becoming slow, the whole system will be blocked. By contrast, decentralized protocol has insufficient information about the agents being used, which might result in a high possibility of agent failure due to internal or external factors, such as losing connections. In this paper, a semi-centralized protocol is proposed to overcome the limitation of the existing protocols and enable robust and adaptable solution in a highly dynamic environment. The outcome of Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE’s) implementation proves the capabilities of the proposed protocol. In comparison with the Contract Net Protocol, the proposed protocol shows significant improvement in time and communication overhead under various conditions.