A Negotiation Framework for Negotiation of Coalition Policies

Abstract

There have been many proposed approaches to performing negotiation in terms of the negotiation procedure, the implementation of agreement, the interactions of software agents representing the different organizations, cooperation among agents, etc. However, one cannot determine a best single approach as it highly depends on the specific application and usage scenario, as well as the needs and goals of the participants. For instance, in some situations, reaching a near pareto-optimal solution is desirable even though it requires that an exhaustive search on all attributes must be performed. In other situations, time might be more valuable and therefore reaching an agreement in a timely manner might have a higher priority. In order to address many different types of negotiation goals and scenarios, there is a need for a flexible negotiation system that can incorporate various alternatives and that is easily extensible and configurable. In this paper, we provide a generic negotiation system that can support many types of negotiation protocols. The proposed system acts as a third party that facilitates the negotiation process between multiple entities and allows them to choose a common negotiation goal and a desired negotiation protocol. We will provide a demonstration of the tool at the conference.