Title: Negotiation mechanisms for multi-agent systems

Speaker: Rodion Podorozhny

Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm, February 25th 2005

Location: Neuces Conference Room

Abstract:

A cooperative, multi-step negotiation mechanism for multi-agent systems 
is presented. This mechanism uses marginal utility gain and marginal utility 
cost to structure the negotiation process. This enables an agent to 
understand another agent's situation in order to find a solution that 
increases their combined  utility. These two values summarize the 
agent's local information and reduce the communication load. This allows 
agents to negotiate over multiple attributes of the commitment which makes 
it more likely for agents to  find a solution that increases the global 
utility by producing more options.  Performed experiments show how 
different protocols perform in a variety of common situations.

The experiments allow observation of the factors that affect the agent's 
ability to strike a good balance between the negotiation gain and the 
negotiation cost.