Adaptive Negotiation Strategy Research Articles

Research on Integrated Learning of Industrial Clusters in Self‐Created Districts

Under the premise of coordinated procurement bilateral and multi‐issue negotiation, adaptive negotiation strategy has become an essential factor for multiagent conflict resolution. This paper studies an adaptive negotiation strategy based on selective integrated learning, which effectively improves negotiation. First, take the suppliers and purchasing companies in the cluster supply chain as the research objects and analyze the characteristics of multilateral negotiation of collaborative procurement. Secondly, the support vector machine algorithm performs adaptive learning for each evaluation data set to estimate the concession range. On this basis, remove the few submodels that perform poorly, recombine the calculation weights, and establish a multiagent clustered supply collaborative procurement negotiation model. The simulation experiment proves the feasibility of the adaptive negotiation strategy and the effectiveness of the adaptive coordination strategy based on selective ensemble learning proposed in this paper from the aspects of concession range prediction error rate, prediction accuracy rate, and negotiation utility.

Adaptive SLA mechanism for service sharing in virtual environments

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss an adaptive SLA mechanism for service sharing in virtual environment, which can organize and govern QoS items in terms of service execution time, reliability, and availability, and provides a common understanding about services, responsibilities, priorities, guarantees and warranties-related virtual cooperative issues. Design/methodology/approach The management framework for SLA is introduced, based on which the whole process including SLA contract, adaptive SLA negotiation strategy, SLA deployment and SLA assessment are discussed, and the prototype is implemented in the cloud manufacturing platform. Findings A proposed SLA framework for service sharing in virtual environments is given; electronic contracts are designed in the framework for encapsulating measurable aspects of service level agreements so as to provide common understanding about the service; and an improved SLA negotiation strategy with three phases is presented for the dynamicity of the virtual services. Originality/value The paper presents a very useful adaptive SLA mechanism for service sharing in virtual environments that can be utilized in concurrent or future advanced manufacturing modes.

An efficient and robust negotiating strategy in bilateral negotiations over multiple items

Multi-item negotiations surround our daily life and usually involve two parties that share common or conflicting interests. Effective automated negotiation techniques should enable the agents to adaptively adjust their behaviors depending on the characteristics of their negotiating partners and negotiation scenarios. This is complicated by the fact that the negotiation agents are usually unwilling to reveal their information (strategies and preferences) to avoid being exploited during negotiation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive negotiation strategy, called ABiNeS, which can make effective negotiations against different types of negotiating partners. The ABiNeS strategy employs the non-exploitation point to adaptively adjust the appropriate time to stop exploiting the negotiating partner and also predicts the optimal offer for the negotiating partner based on the reinforcement-learning based approach. Simulation results show that the ABiNeS strategy can perform more efficient exploitations against different types of negotiating partners, and thus achieve higher overall payoffs compared with the state-of-the-art strategies under negotiation tournaments. We also provide a detailed analysis of why the ABiNeS strategy can negotiate more efficiently compared with other existing state-of-the-art negotiation strategies focusing on two major components. Lastly, we propose adopting the single-agent best deviation principle to analyze the robustness of different negotiation strategies based on model checking techniques. Through our analysis, the ABiNeS strategy is shown to be very robust against other state-of-the-art strategies under different negotiation contexts.

Evaluating practical negotiating agents: Results and analysis of the 2011 international competition

This paper presents an in-depth analysis and the key insights gained from the Second International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2011). ANAC is an international competition that challenges researchers to develop successful automated negotiation agents for scenarios where there is no information about the strategies and preferences of the opponents. The key objectives of this competition are to advance the state-of-the-art in the area of practical bilateral multi-issue negotiations, and to encourage the design of agents that are able to operate effectively across a variety of scenarios. Eighteen teams from seven different institutes competed. This paper describes these agents, the setup of the tournament, including the negotiation scenarios used, and the results of both the qualifying and final rounds of the tournament. We then go on to analyse the different strategies and techniques employed by the participants using two methods: (i) we classify the agents with respect to their concession behaviour against a set of standard benchmark strategies and (ii) we employ empirical game theory (EGT) to investigate the robustness of the strategies. Our analysis of the competition results allows us to highlight several interesting insights for the broader automated negotiation community. In particular, we show that the most adaptive negotiation strategies, while robust across different opponents, are not necessarily the ones that win the competition. Furthermore, our EGT analysis highlights the importance of considering metrics, in addition to utility maximisation (such as the size of the basin of attraction), in determining what makes a successful and robust negotiation agent for practical settings.

Applying hybrid case-based reasoning in agent-based negotiations for supply chain management

In recent years, enormous research effort has been spent on the development of multi-agent systems to automate buyer–seller negotiations in supply chain management (SCM) applications. In many of these agent-based negotiation systems, the negotiation process is restricted to the stage when agents interact to exchange bargaining offers; activities in the pre-bargaining and post-bargaining stages are ignored. With a more comprehensive perspective, the negotiation lifecycle comprises a number of phases including the pre- and post-bargaining phases, in addition to the phase when participants interact to bargain. In this paper, a hybrid case-based reasoning approach is applied in the pre- and post-negotiation phases to support adaptive negotiation strategy for buyer–seller negotiations in SCM applications. When a new negotiation problem arrives, a similar previous negotiation case is retrieved from the case database and its solutions are recommended for inferring the negotiation parameters. The recommended parameters have to be adjusted to suit the new negotiation problem. Subsequent to negotiation completion, negotiation parameters and the negotiation outcome are analyzed and evaluated. After the evaluation, the new negotiation case, including the problem descriptions and solutions, is retained in the case database for future applications.

Time-bound negotiation framework for electronic commerce agents

For efficient and informative coordination of agents especially in electronic commerce environment, a time-bound agent negotiation framework is proposed utilizing a time-based commitment scheme. By attaching commitment duration to agent messages, the traditional contract net protocol is extended to a time-bound negotiation framework (TBNF). The proposed negotiation framework has a new message type which allows for parties to agree upon the extension of a commitment duration, and a novel commitment concept in the form of negative commitment. The semantics of the messages with the commitment duration are interpreted, and then the three typical negotiation protocols are formally defined and compared — nothing-guaranteed protocol, acceptance-guaranteed protocol, and finite-time guarantee protocol — which can be incorporated into TBNF. The TBNF should provide a background for efficient and effective electronic commerce negotiation while accommodating each agent's adaptive negotiation strategy.