FLEXIBILITY IN NEGOTIATION SYSTEMS: AN ARGUMENTATION-BASED APPROACH

Flexible automated negotiation, specially in dynamic, uncertain and unpredictable environments can increase likelihood and quality of agreements and promote agent's properties. For developing flexible negotiation systems, first we should define and formalize flexibility in negotiation. A precise and clear formulation of flexibility in agent-based negotiations has not reported explicitly in the literature. In this paper, we describe the benefits of flexible negotiation and we provide a set of requirements for flexible negotiation in agent-based systems. The main contribution of this paper is an explicit formulation of flexibility in negotiation systems. Based on this formulation a survey and analysis of the existing works in the automated negotiation literature is presented and results are given. Then, according to the proposed formulation, we will show that negotiation systems that are designed and implemented based on argumentation-based approach are flexible and can operate in more dynamic and unpredictable environments.

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