A multiagent multilateral negotiation protocol for joint decision-making

Abstract

We tackle the problem of multilateral negotiation where a group of agents has to make a joint decision. The protocol we propose guides the agents in efficiently coordinating their interrelated negotiations and to coming to an agreement especially when convergence is difficult to obtain in multiagent settings. Negotiation illocutions are formalised to allow interactions between the agents. In addition rules are provided for the agents to manage their interactions. We introduce an illustrative scenario and detail the properties of our protocol. Experimental results show that our protocol guides the agents towards an agreement with reasonable communication and computational complexity.