一种基于不完全信息环境下多议题协商的最优化

文章探讨了Agent之间双边多议题的协商。主要以议程和协商程序这两个因素研究了其结果．并分析了不完全信息环境下不同议程和程序的协商过程，在此基础上，我们确定了逐一问题和一揽子交易两个协商程序的平衡策略，最后，给出了每个Agent所有可能议程和过程组合优化的协商结局。     

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.     

Agent通信的一种语义表示

通信受agent思维状态的驱动,是agent信息交换的过程.通信使agent感知环境、增强行为能力,是社会性的体现,也是协作和协商的重要手段.以BDI思维状态为基础,给出了通用的agent通信语言KQML的一种语义描述,可解决其语义的模糊性,并可避免通信导致的思维状态内部矛盾问题.还讨论了通信与BDI转化的关系,并将其运用于动态、开放的协商过程中,改进了Finin和Cohen等人的工作.     

Automated Negotiation from Declarative Contract Descriptions

Our approach for automating the negotiation of business contracts proceeds in three broad steps. First, determine the structure of the negotiation process by applying general knowledge about auctions and domain–specific knowledge about the contract subject along with preferences from potential buyers and sellers. Second, translate the determined negotiation structure into an operational specification for an auction platform. Third, after the negotiation has completed, map the negotiation results to a final contract. We have implemented a prototype which supports these steps by employing a declarative specification (in courteous logic programs) of (1) high–level knowledge about alternative negotiation structures, (2) general–case rules about auction parameters, (3) rules to map the auction parameters to a specific auction platform, and (4) special–case rules for subject domains. We demonstrate the flexibility of this approach by automatically generating several alternative negotiation structures for the domain of travel shopping in a trading agent competition.     

Contracting With Uncertain Level Of Trust

The paper investigates the impact of trust on market efficiency and bilateral contracts. We prove that a market in which agents are trusted to the degree they deserve to be trusted is as efficient as a market with complete trustworthiness. In other words, complete trustworthiness is not a necessary condition for market efficiency. We prove that distrust could significantly reduce market efficiency, and we show how to solve the problem by using appropriately designed multiagent contracts. The problem of trust is studied in the context of a bilateral negotiation game between a buyer and a seller. It is shown that if the seller's trust equals the buyer's trustworthiness, then the social welfare, the amount of trade, and the agents' utility functions are maximized. The paper also studies the efficiency of advance payment contracts as a tool for improving trustworthiness. It is proved that advance payment contracts maximize the social welfare and the amount of trade. Finally, the paper studies the problem of how to make agents truthfully reveal their level of trustworthiness. An incentive–compatible contract is defined, in which agents do not benefit from lying about their trustworthiness. The analysis and the solutions proposed in this paper could help agent designers avoid many market failures and produce efficient interaction mechanisms.     

100万元以下政府投资项目发包的选择分析

合理选择100万元以下政府投资项目的发包方式,可有效保障项目顺利进行,并实现源头防腐。     

Logical Comparison of Inconsistent Perspectives using Scoring Functions

The language for describing inconsistency is underdeveloped. If a database (a set of formulae) is inconsistent, there is usually no qualification of that inconsistency. Yet, it would seem useful to be able to say how inconsistent a database is, or to say whether one database is more inconsistent than another database. In this paper, we provide a more general characterization of inconsistency in terms of a scoring function for each database . A scoring function S is from the power set of into the natural numbers defined so that S() gives the number of minimally inconsistent subsets of that would be eliminated if the subset was removed from . This characterization offers an expressive and succinct means for articulating, in general terms, the nature of inconsistency in a set of formulae. We then compare databases using their scoring functions. This gives an intuitive ordering relation over databases that we can describe as more inconsistent than. These techniques are potentially useful in a wide range of problems including monitoring progress in negotiations between a number of participants, and in comparing heterogeneous sources of information.     

A trust negotiation system for digital library Web services

A scalable approach to trust negotiation is required in digital library (DL) environments that have large and dynamic user populations. In this paper we introduce Trust-Serv, a model-driven trust negotiation framework for Web services, and show how it can be used to effectively handle trust negotiation in DLs. The framework employs a model for trust negotiation based on state machines, extended with security abstractions. High-level specifications expressed with the state-machine-based model are then translated into formats suitable for automating the trust negotiation process. The proposed framework also supports negotiation policy lifecycle management, an important trait in the dynamic environments that characterize DLs. In particular, we present a set of policy change operations that enable the dynamic evolution of negotiation policies without disrupting ongoing negotiations. The proposed approach has been implemented as a container-centric mechanism that is transparent to the DL and to the developers of DL Web services, simplifying DL development and management as well as enabling scalable deployments.     

Using WinWin Quality Requirements Management Tools: A Case Study

Negotiating stakeholder WinWin relationships among software quality requirements is a technique that emerged during the 1990's in order to overcome the difficulties arising from contract-oriented specification compliance (popular in the 1970's) and service-oriented customer satisfaction (popular in the 1980's). Obstacles to adoption of negotiated win-win relationships include coordination of multiple stakeholder interests and priorities, reasoning of complicated dependencies, and scalability of an exponentially increasing resolution option space. Conflict identification and resolution techniques are key success factors to overcome the obstacles. This paper describes two exploratory knowledge-based tools (called QARCC and S-COST)^* for conflict identification and resolution and how they were used in the digital library projects of a USC Software Engineering class during the 1996/97 school year. A comparative analysis with the artifacts surfaced by stakeholders and the artifacts generated and analyzed by QARCC and S-COST focused on the conflict resolution process, stakeholders' roles and their relationships to quality artifacts, and tool effectiveness. We conclude that the tools helped stakeholders: (1) surface and negotiate conflicts; (2) identify conflicts among functional and quality requirements; and (3) generate, visualize, and negotiate potential resolution options for the conflicts.     

A formal framework for connective stability of highly decentralized cooperative negotiations

Multiagent cooperative negotiation is a promising technique for modeling and controlling complex systems. Effective and flexible cooperative negotiations are especially useful for open complex systems characterized by high decentralization (which implies a low amount of exchanged information) and by dynamic connection and disconnection of agents. Applications include ad hoc network management, vehicle formation, and physiological model combination. To obtain an effective control action, the stability of the negotiation, namely the guarantee that an agreement will be eventually reached, is of paramount importance. However, the techniques usually employed for assessing the stability of a negotiation can be hardly applied in open scenarios. In this paper, whose nature is mainly theoretical, we make a first attempt towards engineering stable cooperative negotiations proposing a framework for their analysis and design. Specifically, we present a formal protocol for cooperative negotiations between a number of agents and we propose a criterion for negotiation stability based on the concept of connective stability. This is a form of stability that accounts for the effects of structural changes on the composition of a system and that appears very suitable for multiagent cooperative negotiations. To show its possible uses, we apply our framework for connective stability to some negotiations taken from literature.