Abstract

We give a new, implemented approach for automating the negotiation of business contracts. We use our previous work on developing a declarative language for expressing and reasoning about contracts and negotiations. Here we newly extend it to include a knowledge base of rules about negotiation structures and auctions. This work addresses three important research questions. First, how can we represent information to allow automatic inference of negotiation structures? Second, how can we automate negotiations in a way that will closely drive a realistic automated platform (the Michigan Internet AuctionBot)? Third, how can we use auction results to form a final contract? We use our work on Courteous Logic Programs, a form of logic-based knowledge representation, as a way to express fully-specified, executable

Citations