Copyright © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
A formal approach to negotiating agents development
Available online 2 October 2002.
References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.
Abstract
This paper presents a formal and executable approach to capture the behaviour of parties involved in a negotiation. A party is modeled as a negotiating agent composed of a communication module, a control module, a reasoning module, and a knowledge base. The control module is expressed as a statechart, and the reasoning module as a defeasible logic program. A strategy specification therefore consists of a statechart, a set of defeasible rules, and a set of initial facts. Such a specification can be dynamically plugged into an agent shell incorporating a statechart interpreter and a defeasible logic inference engine, in order to yield an agent capable of participating in a given type of negotiations. The choice of statecharts and defeasible logic with respect to other formalisms is justified against a set of desirable criteria, and their suitability is illustrated through concrete examples of bidding and multi-lateral bargaining scenarios.
Author Keywords: Automated negotiation; Software agent; Defeasible logic; Statecharts
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Rationale, approach, and enabling formalisms
- 2.1. Desiderata
- 2.2. An architecture for negotiating agents
- 2.3. Expressing internal coordination: Statecharts
- 2.4. Expressing flexible decision-making: defeasible logic
- 2.5. Glueing the control and the reasoning modules
- 3. Case studies
- 4. Related work
- 5. Conclusion
- References






E-mail Article
Add to my Quick Links

Cited By in Scopus (18)






