Automated Negotiations in Multiagent Systems: Modeling, Analysis, and Algorithms

Contemporary information systems typically comprise of many autonomous, interacting components that collaborate to accomplish their tasks. Once these components are integrated in a system, the next big challenge in computing is the automation of the collaboration process via negotiations between them. Considering the tremendous growth of the Internet, automating negotiations between online service providers and consumers such that they all arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement in a reasonable amount of time will be particularly important for the next-generation e-business settings. This book addresses the automated negotiation problem in environments with a conflict of interest among its system components. It presents a survey of negotiation research from multiple fields, a detailed theoretical analysis of this hyper-exponentially complex problem, and an approximate algorithm for solving this problem along with its empirical evaluation showing that it is efficient, stable, scalable, distributed, and simple. This book should be useful to software professionals and researchers in agents and e-business, or anyone interested in negotiations research.

Hrishikesh J. Goradia, Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from University of South Carolina, USA. His research interests include multiagent systems, electronic commerce, service-oriented computing, software engineering, and the semantic web. He can be reached at hjgoradia@gmail.com.