An Extended Protocol for Multiple-Issue Concurrent Negotiation

Negotiation is a technique for reaching mutually beneficial agreement among agents via communication. A concurrent negotiation problem occurs when an agent needs to negotiate with multiple agents to reach agreement. In this paper, we present a protocol to support many-to-many bilateral multiple-issue negotiation in a competitive environment. The protocol is presented in the context of service-oriented negotiation, where one or more self-interested parties can provide services to one or more other parties. By extending existing negotiation protocols, our described protocol enables both service requestors and service providers to manage several negotiation processes in parallel. Moreover, this protocol mitigates the situation where most known one-to-many negotiations are biased in favor of one participating agent, and allow the negotiation participants to make durable commitments to reduce the decommitment situation. We conclude by discussing additional issues related to concurrent multipleissue negotiation.

Authors

• Jiangbo Dang Michael N. Huhns

Keywords

No keywords are indexed for this paper.