Competitive Contract Net Protocol

The proposed Competitive Contract Net Protocol has been designed to facilitate a flexible cooperation in competitive multi-agent environments and to support automated or semi-automated negotiations in competitive domains. The protocol is based on FIPA standards. The protocol covers not only the phase of contracting the commitments, but also allows for a decommitment negotiation and contract termination. Thus, it consists of three phases: (i) a contracting phase, where conditions of agreement are concluded, (ii) an optional decommitment phase, where contract may be breached, and (iii) a contract termination phase, where the compliance with the concluded contract conditions is evaluated. Both the decommitment and non-compliance are bounded with penalties which measurably ensure a compliance with the commitments, but also allow an opportunistic behaviour of the agents at some price.

[1]  Michal Pechoucek,et al.  ExPlanTech and ExtraPlanT: multi-agent technology for production planning, simulation and extra-enterprise collaboration , 2005, Comput. Syst. Sci. Eng..

[2]  Samir Aknine,et al.  An Extended Multi-Agent Negotiation Protocol , 2004, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[3]  Agostino Poggi,et al.  A Contract Decommitment Protocol for Automated Negotiation in Time Variant Environments , 2001, WOA.

[4]  Reid G. Smith,et al.  The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[5]  Maria L. Gini,et al.  A market architecture for multi-agent contracting , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[6]  E. A. Akkoyunlu,et al.  Some constraints and tradeoffs in the design of network communications , 1975, SOSP.

[7]  Nicolas Lhuillier,et al.  FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS , 2003 .

[8]  Fabio Bellifemine,et al.  A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) , 2003, RFC.

[9]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  The Cooperative Problem-solving Process , 1999, J. Log. Comput..

[10]  J. Vokrínek,et al.  Agent Contracting and Reconfiguration in Competitive Environments , 2006 .

[11]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Issues in Automated Negotiation and Electronic Commerce: Extending the Contract Net Framework , 1997, ICMAS.

[12]  Petr Be,et al.  e-Cat – VBE Members Profiling and Competency Management Tool , 2006 .

[13]  J. Bouman,et al.  Specification of service level agreements, clarifying concepts on the basis of practical research , 1999, STEP '99. Proceedings Ninth International Workshop Software Technology and Engineering Practice.

[14]  Martin Andersson,et al.  Leveled Commitment Contracts with Myopic and Strategic Agents , 1998, AAAI/IAAI.

[15]  Eduard Semsch,et al.  e-Cat—Members Profiling and Competency Management Tool for Virtual Organization Breeding Environment , 2006 .

[16]  Neeraj Suri,et al.  Advances in ULTRA-Dependable Distributed Systems , 1994 .

[17]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  The Byzantine Generals Problem , 1982, TOPL.

[18]  Donald Steiner,et al.  FIPA: Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents - Das aktuelle Schlagwort , 1998, Künstliche Intell..

[19]  Ioan Alfred Letia,et al.  Automating the dispute resolution in a task dependency network , 2005, IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology.

[20]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Leveled Commitment Contracts and Strategic Breach , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[21]  Agostino Poggi,et al.  Jade - a fipa-compliant agent framework , 1999 .