Progressive Multi-Agent Negotiation*

This research is concerned with coordination among autonomous agents in cooperative domains where, de.spite conflicting interests, agents can always negotiate to increase their mutual benefits. We introduce a multi-agent negotiation model to model explicitly the negotiation process, and a monotonic negotiation protocol to ensure convergence. Particularly, tile model formalizes progressive negotiation where negotiation among a group of agents can be divided into a number of sub-negotiations which proceed incrementally. We investigate how the sizes of these sub-negotiations affect the negotiation solution.