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Architecting for Reuse: A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation

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Agent-Oriented Software Engineering III (AOSE 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2585))

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Abstract

If agents are to negotiate automatically with one another they must share a negotiation mechanism, specifying what possible actions each party can take at any given time, when negotiation terminates, and what the resulting agreements will be. The current state-of-the-art represents this as a negotiation protocol specifying the flow of messages. However, they omit other aspects of the rules of negotiation (such as obliging a participant to improve on a previous offer), requiring these to be represented implicitly in an agent’s design, potentially resulting in compatibility, maintenance and re-usability problems. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, allowing all of a mechanism to be formal and explicit.We present (i) A taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way. (ii) A simple interaction protocol, which is able to support any mechanism which can be captured using the declarative rules. (iii) A software framework for negotiation, implemented in JADE [3] that allows agents to effectively participate in negotiations defined using our rule taxonomy and protocol.

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. HP Laboratories, Filton Rd, BS34 8QZ, Bristol, UK

    Claudio Bartolini & Chris Preist

  2. Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK

    Nicholas R. Jennings

Authors
  1. Claudio Bartolini
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  2. Chris Preist
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  3. Nicholas R. Jennings
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Trento, 38050 Povo, Trento, Italy

    Fausto Giunchiglia

  2. 3646 West Huron River Drive, 48103, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

    James Odell

  3. Institut für Informatik Technische, Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748, Garching, Germany

    Gerhard Weiß

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bartolini, C., Preist, C., Jennings, N.R. (2003). Architecting for Reuse: A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation. In: Giunchiglia, F., Odell, J., Weiß, G. (eds) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering III. AOSE 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2585. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36540-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36540-0_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00713-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36540-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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