automated negotiations

Institute for Visualization and Perception ResearchI VPR 1

© Copyright 1998 Haim Levkowitz

Automated negotiations

• The best terms for all concerned

• Tuomas Sandholm

• [email protected]



Overview

• Automated negotiations

• Promising application areas

• Reallocation among agents

• Optimization

• Agent-to-agent vs. centrally mediated

• eMediator: features



Automated negotiations

• Negotiation: key component in e-commerce

• Auto: computational agents

• Represent real-world parties

• Find & prepare contracts

• Benefits …



Auto negotiation benefits

• Save human negotiation time

• Better at finding deals in combinatorially & strategically complex situations

• Not at cost to other parties

• Rapidly find solutions that optimize for all



Promising application areas

• Retail e-commerce

• Electricity markets

• Bandwidth allocation

• Manufacturing planning & scheduling in subcontracting networks

• Distributed vehicle routing among independent dispatch centers

• Electronic trading of financial instruments



Reallocation among agents

• Task reallocation among agents: key type of negotiation

• Allocate tasks to agents that handle them least expensively

• Marginal cost-based method for automated task reallocation

• Reallocate all types of items ….



Items to reallocate

• Tasks

• Financial instruments

• Hours of electricity



Cost-based reallocation

• Agent takes task from another as long as it is paid more by other agent than what costs to handle

• Agent gives task to another agent as long as it doesn’t have to pay more than it would cost to handle

• TRACONET: TRAnsportation Cooperation NET



TRACONET

• Automated delivery of task reallocation among freight companies

• 1st distributed automated negotiation among self-interested agents

• Each agent• Own Unix process• Represents single company



TRACONET (cont.)

• Agent takes on delivery tasks

• Gives out tasks

• Recontract-out tasks previously contracted-in



Optimization

• Negotiation can get stuck in local optimization

• Task allocation suboptimal

• No original contract (O) profitable

• To solve: new contract types …



New contract types

• C: cluster• Exchange multiple tasks for payment

• S: swap task for another + sidepayment• M: multiagent

• More than 2 parties in same contract• OCSM …



OCSM …

• Combine previous into atomic contract

• Guarantee globally optimal allocation

• Through finite number of contracts



Agent-to-agent vs. centrally mediated

• Original: agent-to-agent• Auction server ==> centrally mediated

variant• Agents send bids and tasks• ==> Combinatorial auctions

• Allow users to express interrelated valuations of items



eMediator: features

• E-commerce server

• Also services other than auctions

• Combinatorial bidding

• Bidding via price-quantity graphs

• Mobile agents

• Determine winners of combinatorial auction

• Identify profitable contacts for all



Optimal winner determination

• Computationally complex

• ==> Added highly optimized search-based matching algorithm to solve problem



Price-quantity graphs

• User can express continuous preferences



Mobile agents

• User have agents participate in auctions while users disconnected from Internet

• Mobile agents execute on agent dock on or near auction host

• ==> Reduce network latency

• Key issue in time-critical bidding

• Mitsubishi’s Concordia agent dock



Concordia

• Give mobile agents safe execution platform• Bid• Set up auctions• Travel to other auction sites• Observe activity at various auctions• More later



HTML interface

• Users instruct agents

• Automatic generation of Java code for mobile agents before launching



Contract management• Usually: binding

• ==> Can’t undo old commitments to accommodate new events• E.g., tasks more costly than anticipated• New offers more lucrative

• Alleviate: Leveled commitment contracting protocol …



Leveled commitment contracting protocol

• Agents accommodate future events

• Option of unilateral decommit

• Decommitment penalty

automated negotiations

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