Automated intelligent agents inhabiting a shared environmentmust coordinate their activities. Cooperation { not merely coordination { may improve the performance of the individual agents or the overall behavior of the system they form. Research in Distributed Arti cial Intelligence (DAI) addresses the problem of designing automated intelligent systems which interact e ectively. DAI is not the only eld to take on the challenge of understanding cooperation and coordination. There are a variety of other multi-entity environments in which the entities coordinate their activity and cooperate. Among them are groups of people, animals, particles, and computers. We argue that in order to address the challenge of building coordinated and collaborated intelligent agents, it is bene cial to combine AI techniques with methods and techniques from a range of multi-entity elds, such as game theory, operations research, physics and philosophy. To support this claim, we describe some of our projects, where we have successfully taken an interdisciplinary approach. We demonstrate the bene ts in applying multi-entity methodologies and show the adaptations, modi cations and extensions necessary for solving the DAI problems.

Abstract—This paper surveys and analyzes the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) aspects. From the consumer buying behavior perspective, agents are being used in the following activities: need identification, product brokering, buyer coalition formation, merchant brokering, and negotiation. The roles of agents in B2B e-commerce are discussed through the business-to-business transaction model that identifies agents as being employed in partnership formation, brokering, and negotiation. Having identified the roles for agents in B2C and B2B e-commerce, some of the key underpinning technologies of this vision are highlighted. Finally, we conclude by discussing the future directions and potential impediments to the wide-scale adoption of agent-mediated e-commerce. Index Terms—Agent-mediated electronic commerce, intelligent agents. 1

Complex modern-day artifacts are designed cooperatively by groups of experts, each with their own areas of expertise. The interaction of such experts inevitably involves conflict. This paper presents an implemented computational model, based on studies of human cooperative design, for supporting the resolution of such conflicts. This model is based centrally on the insights that general conflict resolution expertise exists separately from domain-level design expertise, and that this expertise can be instantiated in the context of particular conflicts into specific advice for resolving those conflicts. Conflict resolution expertise consists of a taxonomy of design conflict classes in addition to associated general advice suitable for resolving conflicts in these classes. The abstract nature of conflict resolution expertise makes it applicable to a wide variety of design domains. This paper describes this conflict resolution model and provides examples of its operation from an implemente...

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, conceptualisation, 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 sys...

Abstract Negotiations are very important in a multi-agent environment, particularly, in an environment where there are conflicts between the agents, and cooperation would be beneficial. We have developed a general structure for a Negotiating Automated Agent that consists of five modules: a Prime Minister, a Ministry of Defense, a Foreign Office, a Headquarters and Intelligence. These modules are implemented using a dynamic set of local-agents belonging to the different modules. We used this structure to develop a Diplomacy player, Diplomat. Playing Diplomacy involves a certain amount of technical skills as in other board games, but the capacity to negotiate, explain, convince, promise, keep promises or break them, is an essential ingredient in good play. Diplomat was evaluated and consistently played better than human players.

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.

This paper develops a fuzzy constraint based model for bilateral multi-issue negotiation in trading environments. In particular, we are concerned with the principled negotiation approach in which agents seek to strike a fair deal for both parties, but which, nevertheless, maximises their own payoff. Thus, there are elements of both competition and cooperation in the negotiation (hence semi-competitive environments) . One of the key intuitions of the approach is that there is often more than one option that can satisfy the interests of both parties. So, if the opponent cannot accept an offer then the proponent should endeavour to find an alternative that is equally acceptable to it, but more acceptable to the opponent. That is, the agent should make a trade-off. Only if such a trade-off is not possible should the agent make a concession. Against this background, our model ensures the agents reach a deal that is fair (Pareto-optimal) for both parties if such a solution exists. Moreover, this is achieved by minimising the amount of private information that is revealed. The model uses prioritised fuzzy constraints to represent trade-offs between the different possible values of the negotiation issues and to indicate how concessions should be made when they are necessary. Also by using constraints to express negotiation proposals, the model can cover the negotiation space more ef- ficiently since each exchange covers a region rather than a single point (which is what most existing models deal with). In addition, by incorporating the notion of a reward into our negotiation model, the agents can sometimes reach agreements that would not otherwise be possible.

The difference between auction and negotiation mechanisms has blurred with the arrival of the Internet and electronic commerce. The new media provide new opportunities and mechanisms to cooperate or to compete, taking advantage of computer power, the communication possibilities of the network, and the fact that millions of people and businesses are online simultaneously. We discuss the characteristics of different types of auctions and negotiations. We extend the discussion to combinations and hybrids of auctions and negotiations and their possible roles in e-commerce. 1.

The success of large software engineering projects depends critically on the specification, which must represent the requirements of a large number of people with widely differing perspectives. Conventional approaches to software engineering do not address the process of identifying and integrating these perspectives, but instead concentrate on the maintenance of a single consistent description. This results in a specification which represents only one point of view, often the analyst's, excluding suggestions which do not fit with this view. The processes which led to the adoption of this point of view will go unrecorded, making any rationale attached to such a specification incomplete. Other participants will not be able to validate it properly, as it does not relate to their requirements. This thesis integrates ideas drawn from the study of knowledge acquisition, computer-supported co-operative work and negotiation into a model of the specification activity which allows the capture ...

Negotiated search, a paradigm for cooperative search and conflict resolution among heterogeneous, reusable, expert agents has been implemented in a flexible framework, TEAM. We present negotiated search and discuss the use of customized negotiated-search strategies that take advantage of specific capabilities and relationships that exist in an agent set. Strategies are dynamically selected based on the individual agents' views of the problem-solving situation and on communicated knowledge about the characteristics of agents in the agent set. We present experiments that show strategies can reduce the amount of search required to find mutuallyacceptable solutions and can improve the quality of those solutions. The use of customized negotiatedsearch strategies has far-reaching implications for the design of agents that are intended to be reusable and for the assembly of agents into application systems. 1 Introduction We present negotiated-search, a distributed-search paradigm for coo...