Minghua He

KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology For Negotiating Agent Development

Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardized components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, because these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents (especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system.

A TWO-STAGE WIN–WIN MULTIATTRIBUTE NEGOTIATION MODEL: OPTIMIZATION AND THEN CONCESSION

Many automated negotiation models have been developed to solve the conflict in many distributed computational systems. However, the problem of finding win–win outcome in multiattribute negotiation has not been tackled well. To address this issue, based on an evolutionary method of multiobjective optimization, this paper presents a negotiation model that can find win–win solutions of multiple attributes, but needs not to reveal negotiating agents’ private utility functions to their opponents or a third‐party mediator. Moreover, we also equip our agents with a general type of utility functions of interdependent multiattributes, which captures human intuitions well. In addition, we also develop a novel time‐dependent concession strategy model, which can help both sides find a final agreement among a set of win–win ones. Finally, lots of experiments confirm that our negotiation model outperforms the existing models developed recently. And the experiments also show our model is stable and efficient in finding fair win–win outcomes, which is seldom solved in the existing models.

AstonCAT-plus: an efficient specialist for the TAC market design tournament

This paper describes the strategies used by AstonCAT-Plus, the post-tournament version of the specialist designed for the TAC Market Design Tournament 2010. It details how AstonCAT-Plus accepts shouts, clears market, sets transaction prices and charges fees. Through empirical evaluation, we show that AstonCAT-Plus not only outperforms AstonCAT (tournament version) significantly but also achieves the second best overall score against some top entrants of the competition. In particular, it achieves the highest allocative efficiency, transaction success rate and average trader profit among all the specialists in our controlled experiments.

Clustering web documents using hierarchical representation with multi-granularity

Web document cluster analysis plays an important role in information retrieval by organizing large amounts of documents into a small number of meaningful clusters. Traditional web document clustering is based on the Vector Space Model (VSM), which takes into account only two-level (document and term) knowledge granularity but ignores the bridging paragraph granularity. However, this two-level granularity may lead to unsatisfactory clustering results with “false correlation”. In order to deal with the problem, a Hierarchical Representation Model with Multi-granularity (HRMM), which consists of five-layer representation of data and a two-phase clustering process is proposed based on granular computing and article structure theory. To deal with the zero-valued similarity problem resulted from the sparse term-paragraph matrix, an ontology based strategy and a tolerance-rough-set based strategy are introduced into HRMM. By using granular computing, structural knowledge hidden in documents can be more efficiently and effectively captured in HRMM and thus web document clusters with higher quality can be generated. Extensive experiments show that HRMM, HRMM with tolerance-rough-set strategy, and HRMM with ontology all outperform VSM and a representative non VSM-based algorithm, WFP, significantly in terms of the F-Score.

A Knowledge Based System of Principled Negotiation for Complex Business Contract

Automated negotiation systems can do better than human being in many aspects, and thus are applied into many domains ranging from business to computer science. However, little work about automating negotiation of complex business contract has been done so far although it is a kind of the most important negotiation in business. In order to address this issue, in this paper we developed an automated system for this kind of negotiation. This system is based on the principled negotiation theory, which is the most effective method of negotiation in the domain of business. The system is developed as a knowledge-based one because a negotiating agent in business has to be economically intelligent and capable of making effective decisions based on business experiences and knowledge. Finally, the validity of the developed system is shown in a real negotiation scenario where on behalf of human users, the system successfully performed a negotiation of a complex business contract between a wholesaler and a retailer.

Forming Fuzzy Coalitions in Cooperative Superadditive Games

This paper studies fuzzy coalition formation for self-interested agents in cooperative superadditive games. In particular, we consider the situation, where, given a number of tasks, service provider agents seek partners from those available in the environment. These potential partners can commit their resources to multiple coalitions and, in so doing, aim to maximise the sum of the expected Shapley value in the coalitions in which they participate. Specifically, we develop a novel auction-based fuzzy coalition formation algorithm that enables each agent to choose its most preferred coalitions and then to find the coalitions it will actually participate in through simultaneous multiple entry English auctions. When the auction closes, the active bids in each auction represent the set of agents that will perform the task jointly. We then show, by empirical evaluation, that our algorithm outperforms two benchmarks (that allow only crisp coalitions and a greedy approach to fuzzy coalitions) by up to 61.3% with respect to the total value of the coalition structure.

A multi-demand negotiation model based on fuzzy rules elicited via psychological experiments

This paper proposes a multi-demand negotiation model that takes the effect of human users’ psychological characteristics into consideration. Specifically, in our model each negotiating agents preference over its demands can be changed, according to human users’ attitudes to risk, patience and regret, during the course of a negotiation. And the change of preference structures is determined by fuzzy logic rules, which are elicited through our psychological experiments. The applicability of our model is illustrated by using our model to solve a problem of political negotiation between two countries. Moreover, we do lots of theoretical and empirical analyses to reveal some insights into our model. In addition, to compare our model with existing ones, we make a survey on fuzzy logic based negotiation, and discuss the similarities and differences between our negotiation model and various consensus models.