Negotiation Between Economically Motivated Agents

The real-time resource management and budget calculation in the civil construction sector is usually a complex problem, specially when involving a large number of heterogeneous entities, geographically distributed over a wide area. Moreover, the environment unpredictability that usually leads to the necessity of a constant and effective re-scheduling is an important problem. In this paper, a DAI based resource management system for civil construction companies is presented. To allow effective task allocation, a coalition formation strategy and a specific negotiation algorithm, specially adapted to this class of problems, including intra and inter coalition negotiation is introduced. Finally, to illustrate the proposed solutions, a concrete application example is presented.