Framework for Performance Evaluation of Service Negotiations in Agent Systems

We propose a framework and method for evaluation of performance of multi-issue, collaborative service negotiations in multi-agent systems. The framework uses the following evaluation criteria: computation complexity, communication complexity, and scalability. Our proposal is applied to analyze a version of Contract Net protocol that we use in an agent system for disaster management. In particular we discuss how agents compute the additional effort they must deploy to meet conditions of negotiation issues. Two negotiation issues specific to disaster management problems are given as example: location and time.

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