Engineering automated negotiations

Abstract

To make automated negotiation widely used in real scenarios, it is necessary to develop advanced software systems that are able to carry out such negotiation in those scenarios. However, although much work has been done in automated negotiation, most of these efforts have been focused on the development of negotiation protocols and strategies and only a few are centred on software frameworks for automated negotiation. We are concerned with the engineering aspect of automated negotiation. Specifically, we detail a software framework to develop automated negotiations of service level agreements. Unlike other proposals, we provide a detailed description of elements for full decision-making support including evaluating offers, strategy selection, building a market and opponents model, and creating counterproposals.