Negowiki: A set of community tools for the consistent comparison of negotiation approaches

Abstract

There is a number of recent research lines addressing automated complex negotiations. Most of them focus on overcoming the problems imposed by the complexity of negotiation scenarios which are computationally intractable, be it by approximating these complex scenarios with simpler ones, or by developing heuristic mechanisms to explore more efficiently the solution space. The problem with these mechanisms is that their evaluation is usually restricted to very specific negotiation scenarios, which makes very difficult to compare different approaches, to re-use concepts from previous mechanisms to create new ones or to generalize mechanisms to other scenarios. This makes the different research lines in automated negotiation to progress in an isolated manner. A solution to this recurring problem might be to create a collection of negotiation scenarios which may be used to benchmark different negotiation approaches. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a framework for the characterization and generation of negotiation scenarios intended to address this problem. The framework has been integrated in a website, called the Negowiki, which allows to share scenarios and experiment results with the negotiation community, facilitating in this way that researchers compare and share their advancements. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.