Thuc Duong Nguyen

Agent-based formation of virtual organisations

Virtual organisations (VOs) are composed of a number of individuals, departments or organisations each of which has a range of capabilities and resources at their disposal. These VOs are formed so that resources may be pooled and services combined with a view to exploiting a perceived market niche. However, in the modern commercial environment it is essential to respond rapidly to changes in the market to remain competitive. Thus, there is a need for robust, agile, flexible systems to support the process of VO management. Within the CONOISE (www.conoise.org) project, agent-based models and techniques are being developed for the automated formation and maintenance of virtual organisations. In this paper we focus on the former, namely how an effective VO may be formed rapidly for a specified purpose.

Coordinating Multiple Concurrent Negotiations

To secure good deals, an agent may engage in multiple concurrent negotiations for a particular good or service. However for this to be effective, the agent needs to carefully coordinate its negotiations. At a basic level, such coordination should ensure the agent does not procure more of the good than is needed. But to really derive benefit from such an approach, the agent needs the concurrent encounters to mutually influence one another (e.g. a good price with one opponent should enable an agent to negotiate more strongly in the other interactions). To this end, this paper presents a novel heuristic model for coordinating multiple bilateral negotiations. The model is empirically evaluated and shown to be effective and robust in a range of negotiation scenarios.

Managing commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations

Automated negotiation by software agents is a key enabling technology for agent mediated e-commerce. To this end, this paper considers an important class of such negotiations - namely those in which an agent engages in multiple concurrent bilateral negotiations for a good or service. In particular, we consider the situation in which a buyer agent is looking for a single service provider from a number of available ones in its environment. By bargaining simultaneously with these providers and interleaving partial agreements that it makes with them, a buyer can reach good deals in an efficient manner. However, a key problem in such encounters is managing commitments since an agent may want to make intermediate deals (so that it has a definite agreement) with other agents before it gets to finalize a deal at the end of the encounter. To do this effectively, however, the agents need to have a flexible model of commitments that they can reason about in order to determine when to commit and to decommit. This paper provides and evaluates such a commitment model and integrates it into a concurrent negotiation model.

CONOISE: Agent-Based Formation of Virtual Organisations

Virtual organisations (VOs) are composed of a number of individuals, departments or organisations each of which has a range of capabilities and resources at their disposal. These VOs are formed so that resources may be pooled and services combined with a view to the exploitation of a perceived market niche. However, in the modern commercial environment it is essential to respond rapidly to changes in the market to remain competitive. Thus, there is a need for robust, flexible systems to support the process of VO management. Within the CONOISE (www.conoise.org) project, agent-based models and techniques are being developed for the automated formation and maintenance of virtual organisations. In this paper we focus on a critical element of VO management: how an effective VO may be formed rapidly for a specified purpose.

Concurrent bilateral negotiation in agent systems

Bi-lateral negotiations represent an important class of encounter in agent-based systems. To this end, this paper develops and evaluates a heuristic model that enables an agent to participate in multiple, concurrent bi-lateral encounters in competitive situations in which there is information uncertainty and deadlines.

Intelligent agent framework for order entry and management

This paper describes an agent system we have built to handle order entry and management issue in business computing and specialized in the telecommunication domain. Our system is implemented using only industry approved standards and it can both manage complex workflows as well as handle user context dependant service selection. Furthermore, it has the abstract goal representation mechanism, which in turn can detect and reflect to changes in its working environment, leading to more accurate capturing of users requirements. We also detail a number of prototype applications that has been built using our technology and highlight how our approach addresses the business issues around each of these applications.