Advanced Contract Types for Automated Negotiation

一个不断增长的标准化通信基础设施，其中，代理属于不同的组织可以进行交互，预计将提高自我利益的自动化代理之间的自动化谈判的重要性。本计画研究代理人的规范性谈判策略，具体而言：a）借由研究解除合约、惩罚等及其与最佳性的关系，来延伸单一合约的工作; B）设计导致最优合同的谈判协议，以及c）研究多个代理之间的合同序列，包括改变解除合同的速度，偶然性合同，以及更强大的合约类型，以减少回溯的需要。这些研究的结果将被用来设计一个规范的混合多智能体搜索算法，代表最好的选择，在空间中的协议，其中每个维度对应于一个方法论的权衡。除其他外，这项工作预计将对电子商务产生影响，包括通过动态自动化订约形成小型灵活企业动态联盟等方面。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