Abstract
Although multiagent negotiation is usually seen as a process that had to seek the consensus of all the participants, there are situations where unanimous agreement either is not possible or simply the rules imposed by the system do not allow such unanimous agreement. One of this situations is consortium formation in brokerage events where a grand coalition is no viable and an optimal group partition is expected in order to maximize the probability of success of the different consortia. In this paper we propose a novel framework, consensus policy based mediation framework (CPMF), to be able to perform multiagent negotiations where the type of consensus by which an agreement meets in some specific manner the concerns of all the negotiators is considered as an integral part within the multiparty negotiation protocols. CPMF relies on a novel distributed agreement exploration protocol based on the optimization technique (GPS) and on the use of Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators for the aggregation of the agent preferences on the set of alternatives proposed by the mediator in each negotiation round. The mediation rules allow for a linguistic description of the type of agreements needed. A possible application of CPMF to a real-world scenario is shown. Experiments show that CPMF is able to manage negotiations efficiently following predefined consensus policies offering agreements for situations where quorum is not viable.
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de la Hoz, E., Lopez-Carmona, M.A., Klein, M., Marsa-Maestre, I. (2013). Consortium Formation Using a Consensus Policy Based Negotiation Framework. In: Ito, T., Zhang, M., Robu, V., Matsuo, T. (eds) Complex Automated Negotiations: Theories, Models, and Software Competitions. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 435. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30737-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30737-9_1
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