Collaborative Research: A Computational Framework for Agent-based Contracting

本研究的目标是调查和开发计算方法，支持自动谈判的合同在企业对企业的电子商务应用。这些流程需要有能力就具有进度限制的合同进行谈判，通过完成合同工作与具有不同能力的高度分散的供应商网络进行互动，并处理合同执行中的失败。这些问题是使用有限理性的自利代理社区建模的，每个代理代表一个商业实体或一个决策者。算法和决策策略将开发有效的投标建设，投标评估，供应商选择，执行监控，并在多个代理之间的合同重新谈判。将开发一个分布式计算试验台，用于模拟和分析。这项研究的结果将有助于多代理合同的一般计算模型的发展。研究工作还将产生一个高度分散的市场基础设施，其代理人口可供行业和研究人员用于进一步调查，并可供教育工作者作为培训下一代电子商务专家的工具。考虑到企业对企业和按订单生产的电子商务的预计规模，这项研究的潜在回报是很高的。

The goal of this research is to investigate and develop computational methods for supporting automated negotiation of contracts in business-to-business E-commerce applications. Such processes require the ability to negotiate over contracts that have scheduling constraints, interact with a highly distributed web of suppliers with different capabilities through the completion of the contracted work, and deal with failures in contract execution. These problems are modeled using a community of self-interested agents with limited rationality, each representing a business entity or a decision-maker. Algorithms and decision strategies will be developed for effective bid construction, bid evaluation, supplier selection, execution monitoring, and renegotiation of contracts among multiple agents. A distributed computational testbed will be developed and used for simulation, and analysis. The results of this research will contribute to the development of general computational models for multi-agent contracting. The research efforts will also produce a highly distributed market infrastructure with an agent population that can be used by industry and researchers for further investigations, as well as by educators as a tool for training the next generation of e-commerce specialists. The potential payoff of the research is high, given the projected size of the business-to-business and make-to-order e-commerce.