Advanced Contract Types for Automated Negotiation

一个不断增长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，预计将提高自利自动代理之间自动协商的重要性。该项目研究了代理的规范性谈判策略，具体如下：a)通过调查承诺、处罚等及其与最优性的关系，扩展单一合同的工作；B)设计导致最优合同的交易协议，c)研究多个代理之间的合同序列，包括改变履行速度、附带合同和减少回溯需求的更强大的合同类型的影响。这些研究的结果将用于设计一个规范的混合多智能体搜索算法，该算法代表了协议空间中的最佳选择，其中每个维度对应于方法学上的权衡。除此之外，这项工作预计将影响电子商务，包括通过动态自动化合同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