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Heuristics for using CP-nets in utility-based negotiation without knowing utilities

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Abstract

CP-nets have proven to be an effective representation for capturing preferences. However, their use in automated negotiation is not straightforward because, typically, preferences in CP-nets are partially ordered and negotiating agents are required to compare any two outcomes based on a request and an offer in order to negotiate effectively. If agents know how to generate total orders from their CP-nets, they can make this comparison. This paper proposes heuristics that enable the use of CP-nets in utility-based negotiations by generating total orderings. To validate this approach, the paper compares the performance of CP-nets with our heuristics with the performance of UCP-nets that are equipped with complete preference orderings. Our results show that we can achieve comparable performance in terms of the outcome utility. More importantly, one of our proposed heuristics can achieve this performance with significantly smaller number of interactions compared to UCP-nets.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by Boğaziçi University Research Fund under grant BAP5694 and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Most of this work has been done when Reyhan Aydoğan was at Bogazici University. Some of the ideas presented in this paper initially appeared in [1–3].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interactive Intelligence Group, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Reyhan Aydoğan, Koen V. Hindriks & Catholijn M. Jonker

  2. Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, Southampton, UK

    Tim Baarslag

  3. Department of Computer Engineering, Bogazici University, Bebek, 34342, Istanbul, Turkey

    Pınar Yolum

Authors
  1. Reyhan Aydoğan
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  2. Tim Baarslag
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  3. Koen V. Hindriks
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  4. Catholijn M. Jonker
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  5. Pınar Yolum
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Reyhan Aydoğan.

Appendix: CP-nets used in our experiments

Appendix: CP-nets used in our experiments

Table 11 gives information about 10 users’ CP-nets and induced preference graphs from these CP-nets. The second column shows how many dependencies exist in the CP-net, which is equal to the number of edges in the CP-net. Note that more dependency may express more information about user’s preferences. The third column indicates the level of hierarchy—the length of the longest path between ancestor and descendant nodes. This table also shows the number of independent nodes (not having any connections with other nodes) in the CP-net and total number of orderings expressed in CPTs. The last column indicates the depth of induced preference graph from this CP-net.

Table 11 Information about CP-nets and their induced preference graphs
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Aydoğan, R., Baarslag, T., Hindriks, K.V. et al. Heuristics for using CP-nets in utility-based negotiation without knowing utilities. Knowl Inf Syst 45, 357–388 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-014-0798-z

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