A formal approach to negotiating agents development

This paper presents a formal and executable approach to capture the behaviour of parties involved in a negotiation. A party is modeled as a negotiating agent composed of a communication module, a control module, a reasoning module, and a knowledge base. The control module is expressed as a statechart, and the reasoning module as a defeasible logic program. A strategy specification therefore consists of a statechart, a set of defeasible rules, and a set of initial facts. Such a specification can be dynamically plugged into an agent shell incorporating a statechart interpreter and a defeasible logic inference engine, in order to yield an agent capable of participating in a given type of negotiations. The choice of statecharts and defeasible logic with respect to other formalisms is justified against a set of desirable criteria, and their suitability is illustrated through concrete examples of bidding and multi-lateral bargaining scenarios. Keywords. Automated Negotiation, Software Agent...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: ECRA
• Authors: Marlon Dumas, Guido Governatori, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Phillipa Oaks
• Keywords: Control Module, Defeasible Logic, ECRA 2002, Reasoning Module