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Consensus Policy Based Multi-agent Negotiation

  • Conference paper
Agents in Principle, Agents in Practice (PRIMA 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7047))

Abstract

Multiagent negotiation may be understood as a consensus based group decision-making which ideally should seek the agreement of all the participants. However, there exist situations where an unanimous agreement is not possible or simply the rules imposed by the system do not seek such unanimous agreement. In this paper we propose to use a consensus policy based mediation framework (CPMF) to perform multiagent negotiations. This proposal fills a gap in the literature where protocols are in most cases indirectly biased to search for a quorum. The mechanisms proposed to perform the exploration of the negotiation space are derived from the Generalized Pattern Search non-linear optimization technique (GPS). The mediation mechanisms are guided by the aggregation of the agent preferences on the set of alternatives the mediator proposes in each negotiation round. Considerable interest is focused on the implementation of the mediation rules where we allow for a linguistic description of the type of agreements needed. We show empirically that CPMF efficiently manages negotiations following predefined consensus policies and solves situations where unanimous agreements are not viable.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Engineering Department, Universidad de Alcala Escuela Politecnica, 28871, Alcala de Henares, Madrid, Spain

    Enrique de la Hoz, Miguel A. Lopez-Carmona & Ivan Marsa-Maestre

  2. Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

    Mark Klein

Authors
  1. Enrique de la Hoz
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  2. Miguel A. Lopez-Carmona
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  3. Mark Klein
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  4. Ivan Marsa-Maestre
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Informatics, Engineering, Kyoto University, Building 10, 6006-8501, Kyoto, Japan

    David Kinny

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, 1 Roosevelt Road, 106, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jane Yung-jen Hsu

  3. Queensland Research Lab, NICTA, Australia

    Guido Governatori

  4. Decision Systems Lab School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, 2522, NSW, Australia

    Aditya K. Ghose

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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de la Hoz, E., Lopez-Carmona, M.A., Klein, M., Marsa-Maestre, I. (2011). Consensus Policy Based Multi-agent Negotiation. In: Kinny, D., Hsu, J.Yj., Governatori, G., Ghose, A.K. (eds) Agents in Principle, Agents in Practice. PRIMA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7047. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25044-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25044-6_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25043-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25044-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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