Angela Fabregues

DipGame: A challenging negotiation testbed

There is a chronic lack of shared application domains to test advanced research models and agent negotiation architectures in Multiagent Systems. In this paper we introduce a friendly testbed for that purpose. The testbed is based on The Diplomacy Game where negotiation and the relationships between players play an essential role. The testbed profits from the existence of a large community of human players that know the game and can easily provide data for experiments. We explain the infrastructure in the paper and make it freely available to the AI community.

HANA: A Human-Aware Negotiation Architecture

In this paper we propose HANA, a software architecture for agents that need to bilaterally negotiate joint plans of action in realistic scenarios. These negotiations may involve humans and are repeated along time. The architecture is based on a BDI model that represents the uncertainty on the environment as graded beliefs, desires and intentions. The architecture is modular and can easily be extended by incorporating different models (e.g. trust, intimacy, personality, normative...) that update the set of beliefs, desires or intentions. The architecture is dynamic as it monitors the environment and updates the beliefs accordingly. We introduce an innovative search&negotiation method that facilitates HANA agents to cope with huge spaces of joint plans. This method implements an anytime search algorithm that generates partial plans to feed the negotiation process. At the same time the negotiation guides the search towards joint plans that are more likely to be accepted.

Supplier performance in a digital ecosystem

Autonomous entities in a digital ecosystem are expected to interact, negotiate and make agreements. The work introduced in this paper focuses on how these autonomous entities evaluate and rank the other participants in the digital ecosystem using past experiences. These past experiences allow agents to learn a probabilistic model of the behaviour of the others. We introduce a trust measure based on this probabilistic model of behaviour and a software tool that helps in the decision making process of how to choose the right partner for our next agreemeent.

A mobile code bundle extension for application-defined routing in delay and disruption tolerant networking

In this paper, we introduce software code to improve Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) performance. DTN is extremely useful when source and destination nodes are intermittently connected. DTN implementations use application-specific routing algorithms to overcome those limitations. However, current implementations do not support the concurrent execution of several routing algorithms. In this paper, we contribute to this issue providing a solution that consists on extending the messages being communicated by incorporating software code for forwarding, lifetime control and prioritisation purposes. Our proposal stems from the idea of moving the routing algorithms from the host to the message. This solution is compatible with Bundle Protocol (BP) and facilitates the deployment of applications with new routing needs. A real case study based on an emergency scenario is presented to provide details of a real implementation. Several simulations are presented to prove the feasibility and usability of the system and to analyse its performance in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches.

An Environment to Build and Track Agent-Based Business Collaboration

This chapter describes an environment to support the rapid assembly of agent-oriented business collaborations. Our environment allows: (i) setting up a collaboration environment as a virtual organization; (ii) reaching agreements within the collaboration environment to form short-term business collaborations; (iii) enacting business collaborations; and (iv) tracking the performance of agents within business collaborations to build their trust and reputation within the collaboration environment.