Learning to select negotiation strategies in multi-agent meeting scheduling

Abstract

In this paper, we look at the Multi-Agent Meeting Scheduling problem where distributed agents negotiate meeting times on behalf of their users. While many negotiation approaches have been proposed for scheduling meetings, it is not well understood how agents can negotiate strategically in order to maximize their users' utility. To negotiate strategically, agents need to learn to pick good strategies for negotiating with other agents. We show how the playbook approach, introduced by [1] for team plan selection in small-size robot soccer, can be used to select strategies. Selecting strategies in this way gives some theoretical guarantees about regret. We also show experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.