Advanced Contract Types for Automated Negotiation

越来越多的标准化通信基础设施，属于不同组织的代理可以在其上进行交互，预计将提高自私自利的自动代理之间自动谈判的重要性。本项目研究代理人的规范谈判策略，特别是：a)通过调查解除承诺、惩罚等及其与最优的关系来扩展关于单一合同的工作；b)设计导致最优合同的禁止协议；以及c)研究多个代理人之间的合同序列，包括改变解除承诺的速度、或有合同以及减少回溯需求的更强大的合同类型的影响。这些研究的结果将被用来设计一个标准化的混合多智能体搜索算法，它表示协议空间中的最佳选择，其中每个维度都对应于一个方法论上的权衡。其中，这项工作预计将对电子商务产生影响，包括通过动态自动签约形成小型敏捷企业的动态联盟等方面。Http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~sandholm

A growing standardized communications infrastucture, over which, agents belonging to different organizations can interact, is expected to raise the importance of automated negotiation among self-interested automated agents. This project investigates normative negotiation stratagies for agents, specifically: a) extending work on single contracts by investigating decommitments, penalties, etc. and their relationships to optimality; b) designing barganing protocals that lead to optimal contracts, and c) studying sequences of contracts among multiple agents, including the affects of changing the pace of decommitments, contingancy contracts, and more powerful contract types that reduce needs for backtracking. The results of these studies will be used to design a normative hybrid multi-agent search algorithm that repesents the best chice in a space of protocals where each dimension corresponds to a methodilogical tradeoff. Among other things, this work is expected to impact electronic commerce, including such aspects as the formation of dynamic alliances of small agile enterprises through dynamic automated contracting. http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~sandholm