Complex negotiations in multi-agent systems.

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are distributed systems where autonomous entities called agents, either human or software, pursue their own goals. The MAS paradigm has been proposed as the appropriate modeling approach for the deployment of applications like electronic commerce, multi-robot systems, security applications, and so forth. In the MAS community, the vision of open multi-agent system, where heterogeneous agents can enter and leave the system dynamically, has gained strength as a potentially interesting modeling paradigm due to its conceptual relation with technologies like world wide web, grid computing, and virtual organizations. Given the heterogeneity and agent's self-interest, conflict is a candidate phenomenon to arise in multi-agent systems.In the last few years, the term agreement technologies has been used to address all the mechanisms that, directly or indirectly, promote the resolution of conflicts in computational systems like multi-agent systems. Among agreement technologies, automated negotiation is proposed as one key mechanism in conflict resolution due to its analogous use in human conflict resolution. Automated negotiation consists of an automated exchange of proposals carried out by software agents on behalf of their users. The final goal is the achievement of an agreement with all the involved parts.Despite being studied by scholars in Artificial Intelligence for several years, several problems have not been addressed by the scientific community yet. The main objective of this thesis is proposing negotiation models for complex scenarios where the complexity may stem from (i) limited computational capabilities or (ii) the necessity to accommodate the preferences of multiple individuales. In the first part of the thesis we propose a bilateral negotiation model for the problem of negotiation in Ambient Intelligence (AmI), a domain with a special emphasis iii on computational efficiency due to the limited capability of AmI devices. In the second part of the thesis we propose several negotiation models for agent-based negotiation teams. A negotiation team is a group of individuals that acts together as single negotiation party due to its common interests in the negotiation at hand.The complexity of negotiation teams resides in the fact that despite having common interests, intra-team conflict is also present. As far as we are concerned, the topic of negotiation teams in MAS is introduced with this thesis.iv ResumenLos sistemas multi-agente (SMA) son sistemas distribuidos donde entidades autó-nomas llamadas agentes, ya sean humanos o software, persiguen sus propios objetivos. El paradigma de SMA ha sido propuesto como la aproximación de modelo apropiada para aplicaciones como el comercio electrónico, los sistemas multi-robot, aplicaciones de seguridad, etc. En la comunidad de SMA, la visión de sistemas multi-agente abiertos, donde agentes heterogéneos pueden entrar y salir del sistema dinámicamente, ha cobrado fuerza como paradigma de modelado debido a su relación conceptual con tecnolo...