A Nonmonotonic Soft Concurrent Constraint Language to Model the Negotiation Process

We present an extension of the Soft Concurrent Constraint language that allows the non-monotonic evolution of the constraint store. To accomplish this, we introduce some new operations: retract(c) reduces the current store by c, update X(c) transactionally relaxes all the constraints of the store that deal with the variables in the set X, and then adds a constraint c; nask(c) tests if c is not entailed by the store. The new retraction operators also permit to reason about Belief Revision, i.e. the process of changing beliefs to take into account a new piece of information. We present this framework as a possible solution to the negotiation of resources (e.g. web services and network resource allocation) that need a given Quality of Service (QoS). For this reason we also show the the new operators of the language satisfy the Belief Revision postulates [20], which can be used in the negotiation process. The QoS requirements (expressed as semiring levels) of all the parties should converge on a formal agreement through a negotiation process, which specifies the contract that must be enforced.

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