Constraint agents can negotiate

The importance of automated negotiation systems is increasing with the emergence of new technologies supporting faster reasoning engines and mobile code. One form of commerce that could benefit from automation is contracting. A broad variety of negotiation protocols has evolved in traditional markets. However, the primary focus of current research is on automation and the extension of these protocols. We argue that one fundamental question has been neglected: how to match the negotiation strategy and protocol to electronic markets. This paper briefly explores current concepts and directions in negotiation and collaboration strategies in multi agent systems. The paper concentrates on improving mobile constraint agents' ability to locate and utilize a suitable negotiation protocol. We present the service discovery framework which enables the agent to browse the network and locate a constraint solver with characteristics matching the scheduling problem at hand.