A Negotiation Protocol for Meeting Scheduling Agent

Abstract

Negotiation is a general mechanism for reaching an agreement that involves multiple individuals. In multi-agent sys- tems, automatic negotiation is one of the main ongoing research issues. Over the last two decades, many attempts have been made to handle naturally distributed agreement problems via automatic negotiation. These naturally distributed problems are easy to understand for their simplicity, but are hard to handle automatically. In order to reach an agreement using automatic negotiation, there is a need for a structured negotiation protocol. In this paper, we propose an agent negotiation protocol for meeting scheduling, one of the prominent naturally distributed problem. This paper assumes that there is a scheduling agent and it has the knowledge about user preferences, meeting participants’profile, holds a reasoning mechanism to evaluate a meeting invitation, and capable of selecting negotiation strategies automatically. The proposed negotiation protocol assists the meeting scheduling agent to handle bilateral and multilateral negotia- tion scenarios. We demonstrate a number of meeting scheduling scenarios to show how the protocol assists automatic negotiation process and its effectiveness during the scheduling activities.