Coordinating the Bidding Strategy in Multiissue Multiobject Negotiation With Single and Multiple Providers

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of flexible procurement of multiple distinct services characterized by multiple nonfunctional characteristics, i.e., quality-of-service attributes. We consider the one-to-many negotiation approach as a flexible method for procuring multiple different services by a buyer agent. We address the problem of coordinating the bidding strategy amongst multiple concurrent negotiations and propose novel dynamic negotiation strategies. The proposed strategies consider the behaviors of the opponents of the current negotiation encounter in managing the local reservation values of the common negotiation issues (attributes) of different services. Most previous works consider the problem of negotiation over a single object characterized by one or more issues. We extend our previous work and investigate a more complex situation where a buyer agent negotiates over multiple distinct services given that each service has multiple negotiation issues and multiple possible providers. The experimental results show evidence for the effectiveness and robustness of our dynamic negotiation strategies under various negotiation environments.

An Effective Negotiation Strategy for Quantitative and Qualitative Issues in Multi-Agent Systems

“…Since we consider a one-to-one negotiation form and to characterize our work by being self-contained, we present a simplified negotiation model of the one that introduced in [6]. It is a simplified negotiation model because we are considering a bilateral negotiation (a buyer agent and a seller agent) while the model presented in [6] considers multiple seller agents and multiple buyer agents.…”

“…Negotiation can be seen as a negotiation process in which two or more parties articulate requests and then move towards an agreement [1]. For the last two decades, multi-agent negotiations were an important research subject [5][6][7][8][9][10]. Most work in the literature investigates the offer generation problem.…”

“…In terms of both time required to reach agreement and negotiation results, it is more efficient than manual negotiation. A larger search space for an agreement can be explored by automating the negotiations process and indeed better results in multi-issue negotiations [6] can be achieved. Moreover, manual negotiations are generally regarded as too uncomfortable or stressful.…”

ANEGMA: an automated negotiation model for e-markets

“…However, the design of autonomous agents capable of learning negotiation strategies from concurrent interactions with other agents is still an important open problem. Aspects of this problem have been studied previously, but mainly using heuristic strategies [3,35,39,55] that, as such, do not support learning. From these, strategies that can adapt to changes in the environment exist, for example see [55].…”

Multi-agent single-objective negotiation mechanism of personalized product supply chain based on personalized index

“…The experimental results approved the effectiveness of dynamic negotiating tactics in different negotiating environments. 45 Manupati et al 46 describe a negotiation approach-based mobile agent and presented the functions and the fundamental framework of the method, and an illustrative example was presented to validate the feasibility of the approach. Ilany and Gal 47 discussed how to select algorithm in bilateral negotiation and designed a meta-agent for predicting the performance of different negotiating tactics; the simulation results showed the effectiveness of the method.…”