Cooperation-Based Multilateral Multi-Issue Negotiation for Crisis Management

In the crisis management problems, the coordination of emergency services and the evacuation of the injured people are a key issue in the response to a large scale crisis since lives are at stake. One can observe that the evacuation is based on three important elements: the examination and classification of the victims, the search for an allocation in the hospitals in the surrounding area and the transport. In this paper, we propose to assist the emergency call centre in the choice of a hospital for each injured man/woman according to his/her pathology, hospitals constraints and preferences, transportation and so on. The negotiation being a process by which a joint decision is made by two or more parties [1], we propose a negotiation based approach where agents are led to cooperate in order to achieve a global goal while trying to satisfy as best as possible individual preferences. This approach deals with more than two parties, each having its own decision criteria to evaluate an offer with multiple and dependent issues. Moreover, the preferences of our agents are modelled using a multi-criteria methodology and tools enabling us to take into account information about the improvements that can be done on a proposal, in order to help in quickening the search of a consensus between the agents. Therefore, we propose a negotiation protocol consisting in solving our decision problem using a MAS with a multi-criteria decision aiding modelling at the agent level and a cooperation-based multilateral multi-issue negotiation protocol. This protocol is studied under a non-cooperative approach and it is shown that it has subgame perfect equilibria, provided when agents behave rationally. Moreover, these equilibria converge to the usual maximum solution.