Providing Telecommunication Services through Multi-agent Negotiation

Abstract

To provide services to customers, the components of the international telecommunications system have to agree on joint activities and on the use of resources. In this paper we show how simple and clear models of interaction and behavior can be combined in a generic negotiation architecture able to automate the agreement reaching process between agents that, like in the global telecommunications system, have different preferences, policies and authority over resources and activities. At the basis of the architecture is an authority model of how agents can influence each other by setting obligations and interdictions upon their behavior. This ability is conferred to agents by their ownership over resources and activities. The architecture integrates a conversational component, enforcing and ensuring the well-formedness of the interaction, a representation of action formalizing agents’ authority to set obligations and interdictions upon other agents and a constraint optimization reasoning component allowing parties to deliberate over behaviors and outcomes to decide on their next move. We discuss in detail how this architecture is applied to dynamically negotiate the provisioning of communication services based on the detection and resolution of feature interactions.