Negotiation is essential in settings where autonomous agents have conflicting interests and a desire to cooperate. For this reason, mechanisms in which agents exchange potential agreements according to various rules of interaction have become very popular in recent years as evident, for example, in the auction and mechanism design community. However, a growing body of research is now emerging which points out limitations in such mechanisms and advocates the idea that agents can increase the likelihood and quality of an agreement by exchanging arguments which influence each others' states. This community further argues that argument exchange is sometimes essential when various assumptions about agent rationality cannot be satisfied. To this end, in this article, we identify the main research motivations and ambitions behind work in the field. We then provide a conceptual framework through which we outline the core elements and features required by agents engaged in argumentation-based negotiation, as well as the environment that hosts these agents. For each of these elements, we survey and evaluate existing proposed techniques in the literature and highlight the major challenges that need to be addressed if argument-based negotiation research is to reach its full potential.

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Argumentation-based negotiation

The development of cognitive science is one of the most remarkable and fascinating intellectual achievements of the modern era. The quest to understand the mind is as old as recorded human thought; but the progress of modern science has offered new methods and techniques which have revolutionized this enquiry. Oxford University Press now presents a masterful history of cognitive science, told by one of its most eminent practitioners. Cognitive science is the project of understanding the mind by modeling its workings. Psychology is its heart, but it draws together various adjoining fields of research, including artificial intelligence; neuroscientific study of the brain; philosophical investigation of mind, language, logic, and understanding; computational work on logic and reasoning; linguistic research on grammar, semantics, and communication; and anthropological explorations of human similarities and differences. Each discipline, in its own way, asks what the mind is, what it does, how it works, how it developed - how it is even possible. The key distinguishing characteristic of cognitive science, Boden suggests, compared with older ways of thinking about the mind, is the notion of understanding the mind as a kind of machine. She traces the origins of cognitive science back to Descartes's revolutionary ideas, and follows the story through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the pioneers of psychology and computing appear. Then she guides the reader through the complex interlinked paths along which the study of the mind developed in the twentieth century. Cognitive science, in Boden's broad conception, covers a wide range of aspects of mind: not just 'cognition' in the sense of knowledge or reasoning, but emotion, personality, social communication, and even action. In each area of investigation, Boden introduces the key ideas and the people who developed them. No one else could tell this story as Boden can: she has been an active participant in cognitive science since the 1960s, and has known many of the key figures personally. Her narrative is written in a lively, swift-moving style, enriched by the personal touch of someone who knows the story at first hand. Her history looks forward as well as back: it is her conviction that cognitive science today--and tomorrow--cannot be properly understood without a historical perspective. Mind as Machine will be a rich resource for anyone working on the mind, in any academic discipline, who wants to know how our understanding of our mental activities and capacities has developed.

Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science

We present a model of cooperative problem solving that describes the process from its beginning, with some agent recognizing the potential for cooperation with respect to one of its goals, through to team action. Our approach is to characterize the mental states of the agents that lead them to solicit, and take part in, cooperative action. The model is formalized by expressing it as a theory in a quantified multi-modal logic.

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The Cooperative Problem-Solving Process

An epistemic goal is a goal about the knowledge possessed by an agent or group of agents. In this paper, we address the problem of how plans might be developed for a group of agents to cooperate to bring about such a goal. We present a novel approach to this problem, in which the problem is formulated as one of model checking in Alternating Temporal Epistemic Logic (ATEL). After introducing this logic, we present a model checking algorithm for it, and show that the model checking problem for this logic is tractable. We then show how multiagent planning can be treated as a model checking problem in ATEL, and discuss the related issue of checking knowledge preconditions for multiagent plans. We illustrate the approach with an example. We then describe how this example was implemented using the MOCHA model checking system, and conclude by discussing the relationship of our work with that of others in the planning and speech acts communities.

Tractable multiagent planning for epistemic goals

This paper describes work undertaken in the ADEPT (Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks) project towards developing an agent-based infrastructure for managing business processes. We describe how the key technology of negotiating, service providing, autonomous agents was realised and demonstrate how this was applied to the BT business process of providing a customer quote for network services.

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Using intelligent agents to manage business processes

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/4511388.pdf

Eduardo Alonso Fernández

Papers

Rules of encounter: designing conventions for automated negotiation among computers