Publication Details

Structured Negotiation

by Ortiz, C.L. and Hsu, E.

in First International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Abstract

Structured negotiation is proposed as a new method through which collaborating agents can seek consensus on the apportionment of tasks and resources. The approach draws on research in collaborative planning and human dialog understanding: agent interactions are organized in a manner that reflects the structure of a shared plan. Negotiations are incremental and interleaved with the shared planning process while communications supporting negotiations are made efficient by drawing on knowledge of a prevailing context. Agent proposals to team members are annotated with causal information that compactly expresses relationships between new proposals and the current context. Normative guidelines for proposal generation further restrict communications of ancillary information to only those fragments that represent departures from the norm. Finally, a set of interpretation rules allows agents to infer information not explicitly communicated.

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Associated Projects

	Distributed Continual Planning and Execution for Autonomous Air Vehicles This goal of this project is to develop a new software capability for the reprogrammable, coordinated command and control of teams of autonomous unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs).
	TEAMBOTICA: A Robotic framework for integrated teaming, tasking, networking and control Teambotica is a research initiative to develop the computational framework necessary for intelligent, autonomous teams of robots to operate in hostile environments.
	The Autonomous Negotiating Teams Project The Incremental Negotiation and Coalition Formation for Resource-bounded Reasoners project will develop new incremental negotiation and coalition formation strategies over abstraction spaces, emphasizing focused and time-sensitive interactions between ANT members in which planning and execution activities are interleaved. Negotiation and coalition strategies will be structured around the stages through which group plans evolve, as represented within the SharedPlans (SP) theory of collaboration.

AIC Personnel

	Name	Title	E-mail
	Hsu, Eric I	Alumnus
	Ortiz, Charles L	Program Director