Peyman Faratin

Automated Negotiation: Prospects, Methods and Challenges

An increasing number of computer systems are being viewed in terms of autonomous agents. There are two main drivers to this trend. Firstly, agents are being advocated as a next generation model for engineering complex, distributed systems (Jennings 2000; Wooldridge 1997). Secondly, agents are being used as an overarching framework for bringing together the component AI subdisciplines that are necessary to design and build intelligent entities (Nilsson 1998; Russel and Norvig 1995). While there is still much debate about the precise nature of agenthood, an increasing number of researchers find the following characterisation useful (Wooldridge 1997):

Negotiation Decision Functions for Autonomous Agents

We present a formal model of negotiation between autonomous agents. The purpose of the negotiation is to reach an agreement about the provision of a service by one agent for another. The model defines a range of strategies and tactics that agents can employ to generate initial offers, evaluate proposals and offer counter proposals. The model is based on computationally tractable assumptions, demonstrated in the domain of business process management and empirically evaluated.

Using similarity criteria to make issue trade-offs in automated negotiations

Automated negotiation is a key form of interaction in systems that are composed of multiple autonomous agents. The aim of such interactions is to reach agreements through an iterative process of making offers. The content of such proposals are, however, a function of the strategy of the agents. Here we present a strategy called the trade-off strategy where multiple negotiation decision variables are traded-off against one another (e.g., paying a higher price in order to obtain an earlier delivery date or waiting longer in order to obtain a higher quality service). Such a strategy is commonly known to increase the social welfare of agents. Yet, to date, most computational work in this area has ignored the issue of trade-offs, instead aiming to increase social welfare through mechanism design. The aim of this paper is to develop a heuristic computational model of the trade-off strategy and show that it can lead to an increased social welfare of the system. A novel linear algorithm is presented that enables software agents to make trade-offs for multi-dimensional goods for the problem of distributed resource allocation. Our algorithm is motivated by a number of real-world negotiation applications that we have developed and can operate in the presence of varying degrees of uncertainty. Moreover, we show that on average the total time used by the algorithm is linearly proportional to the number of negotiation issues under consideration. This formal analysis is complemented by an empirical evaluation that highlights the operational effectiveness of the algorithm in a range of negotiation scenarios. The algorithm itself operates by using the notion of fuzzy similarity to approximate the preference structure of the other negotiator and then uses a hill-climbing technique to explore the space of possible trade-offs for the one that is most likely to be acceptable.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Autonomous Agents for Business Process Management

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale, organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However, since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore, a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem-solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our systemto a real-world problem faced by British Telecom.

Negotiating Complex Contracts

Work to date on computational models of negotiation has focused almost exclusively on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-optimal social welfares for negotiations with binary issue dependencies.

Using similarity criteria to make negotiation trade-offs

Addresses the issues involved in software agents making trade-offs during automated negotiations in which they have information uncertainty and resource limitations. In particular the importance of being able to make tradeoffs in real-world applications is highlighted and an algorithm for performing trade-offs for multi-dimensional goods is developed. The algorithm uses the notion of fuzzy similarity in order to find negotiation solutions that are beneficial to both parties. Empirical results indicate the benefits and effectiveness of the trade-off algorithm in a range of negotiation situations.

The Dynamics of Collaborative Design: Insights from Complex Systems and Negotiation Research

Almost all complex artifacts nowadays, including physical artifacts such as airplanes, as well as informational artifacts such as software, organizations, business processes, plans, and schedules, are defined via the interaction of many, sometimes thousands of participants, working on different elements of the design. This collaborative design process is typically expensive and time-consuming because strong interdependencies between design decisions make it difficult to converge on a single design that satisfies these dependencies and is acceptable to all participants. Recent research from the complex systems and negotiation literatures has much to offer to the understanding of the dynamics of this process. This paper reviews some of these insights and offers suggestions for improving collaborative design.

Implementing a business process management system using adept: A real-world case study

This article describes how the agent-based design of ADEPT (advanced decision environment for process tasks) and implementation philosophy was used to prototype a business process management system for a real-world application. The application illustrated is based on the British Telecom (BT) business process of providing a quote to a customer for installing a network to deliver a specified type of telecommunications service. Particular emphasis is placed upon the techniques developed for specifying services, allowing agents with heterogeneous information models to interoperate, allowing rich and exible interagent negotiation to occur, and on the issues related to interfacing agent-based systems and humans. This article builds upon the companion article (Applied Artificial Intelligence Vol. 14, no. 2, pgs. 145¨189) that provides details of the rationale and design of the ADEPT technology deployed in this application.

ADEPT: an agent-based approach to business process management

Successful companies organise and run their business activities in an efficient manner. Core activities are completed on time and within specified resource constraints. However to stay competitive in todays markets, companies need to continually improve their efficiency — business activities need to be completed more quickly, to higher quality and at lower cost. To this end, there is an increasing awareness of the benefits and potential competitive advantage that well designed business process management systems can provide. In this paper we argue the case for an agent-based approach: showing how agent technology can improve efficiency by ensuring that business activities are better scheduled, executed, monitored, and coordinated.

Designing and Implementing a Multi-Agent Architecture for Business Process Management

This paper presents a general multi-agent architecture for the management of business processes, and an agent design that has been implemented within such a system. The autonomy of the agents involved in the system is considered paramount. Therefore, for agents to agree on the distribution of problem solving effort within the system they must negotiate. The knowledge sharing and negotiation functions of such an agent are focused on in this paper.