Automated negotiation in open and distributed environments

Automated negotiation is one of the most common approaches used to make decisions and manage disputes between computational entities leading them to optimal agreements. Many existing works tackle single-issue negotiations and the negotiation environment is assumed to be static so that the agents can make decisions based solely on the proposals of the counterparts and their own fixed parameters. Most real-world scenarios, however, involve complex domains and dynamic environments. In such cases, it is no longer sufficient to consider negotiation as an isolated activity in a static environment. Therefore, a more general framework for automated negotiation is needed in which the negotiation agents can be very flexible and adaptive. In this paper, we describe a generic framework for automated negotiation, which captures descriptively the social dynamics of the negotiation process. The proposed framework enables the agents to behave responsively to the changes in the environment. Their strategies can adapt as the conditions outside of the negotiation change to ensure that their decisions remain rational. And the agents are proactive and responsive by searching for options, which are outside of the negotiation and which may improve their outcomes. The key ideas and the overall system architecture together with a specific negotiation instance in a basic bilateral setting are described, along with two illustrative examples. The first example is in the context of e-commerce, and the second example is an application scenario of service level agreement negotiation in service computing. We also describe a prototypical implementation of the proposed negotiation framework.