Architectures for Negotiating Agents

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Architectures for Negotiating Agents

• Ronald Ashri1, Iyad Rahwan2, and Michael Luck1

1. Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia
Group University of Southampton 2. Dept of
Information Systems University of Melbourne
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Overview

• Negotiating Agents
• Engineering Agent Architectures
• Agent Construction Model
• Negotiating Agent Architectures
• Basic Negotiating Agent
• Argumentative Negotiating Agent
• Conclusions

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Negotiating Agents

• Automated Negotiation can resolve the problem of
  access to scarce resources between agents by
  enabling them to arrive at mutually acceptable
  agreements
• Approach is finding application in a wide range
  of domains (e.g. Trading Agent Competition)
• Extensive research into alternative negotiation
  frameworks
• Software engineering issues have not been
  addressed to the same extent

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Negotiating Agents

• Design a general negotiating agent architecture
• Extend it to deal with argument-based negotiation
• Foundational work towards establishing conceptual
  models to enable comparison and practical design
  and implementation of a range of negotiating
  architectures

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Engineering Agent Architectures

• An Agent Construction Model that is based on
• Abstract Agent Model (SMART)
• Architectural neutrality
• Modularity

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SMART Structured, Modular Agent Relationships
and Types (Luck and dInverno)

• Provides the underlying theoretical approach
• It is already architecturally neutral
• Has been used to describe a range of agent
  architectures

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SMART A very brief introduction

• Compositional approach to agent description based
  on actions and attributes
• An agent has a set of attributes and a set of
  capabilities.
• Agents have goals, where goals are sets of
  attributes representing desirable environmental
  states
• Autonomous agent generate their own goals through
  motivations

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Description, Structure and Behaviour

• Descriptive specification (SMART)
• What an agent is and does
• Attributes, capabilities, goals
• Structural Specification
• The building blocks
• Actuators, Sensors, Infostores and Controllers
• Behavioural Specification
• How the agent behaves
• Links between components, execution sequence

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Agent Construction Model
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Negotiation Framework

• Negotiation Protocol
• Communication Language
• Domain Ontologies
• Participating Agents

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Basic Negotiating Agent
protocol rules
proposal
possible response
proposal history
opponent identity
response
proposal content
opponent model
evaluation
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Argumentative Negotiating Agent
proposal
protocol rules
proposal
argument content
proposal history
opponent identity
proposal content
opponent model
response
evaluation
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Conclusions

• Negotiation capabilities defined in modular
  fashion
• Opens up debate on how negotiating agents should
  be engineered (can we have automatic assembly of
  agents based on domain needs)
• Facilitates comparison of different architectures
  based on common concepts

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Future Work

• Development of libraries of architectures
• Large scale implementation
• Integration with agent development methodologies