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Effective Automated Negotiation Based on Issue Dendrograms and Partial Agreements

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Abstract

Negotiation is both an important topic in multi-agent systems research and an important aspect of daily life. Many real-world negotiations are complex and involve multiple interdependent issues, therefore, there has been increasing interest in such negotiations. Existing nonlinear automated negotiation protocols have difficulty in finding solutions when the number of issues and agents is large. In automated negotiations covering multiple independent issues, it is useful to separate out the issues and reach separate agreements on each in turn. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to automated negotiations based on recursive partitioning using an issue dendrogram. A mediator first finds partial agreements in each sub-space based on bids from the agents, then combines them to produce the final agreement. When it cannot find a solution, our proposed method recursively decomposes the negotiation sub-problems using an issue dendrogram. In addition, it can improve the quality of agreements by considering previously-found partial consensuses. We also demonstrate experimentally that our protocol generates higher-optimality outcomes with greater scalability than previous methods.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by CREST, JST (JPMJCR15E1) and JSPS KAKENHI (15H01703).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Shinji Kakimoto & Katsuhide Fujita

Authors
  1. Shinji Kakimoto
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  2. Katsuhide Fujita
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shinji Kakimoto.

Additional information

Shinji Kakimoto was master student of faculty of Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. He received the B.S. and M.S. degree from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan, in 2015 and 2017, respectively. His research interests are in automated negotiation and multi-agent system.

Katsuhide Fujita is an associate professor of Institute of Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. He received the B.E., M.E, and Doctor of Engineering from the Nagoya Institute of Technology in 2008, 2010, and 2011, respectively. From 2010 to 2011, he was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). From 2010 to 2011, he was a visiting researcher at MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2011 to 2012, he was a Project Researcher of School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo. He is an Associate Professor of Institute of Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology since 2012. His main research interests include multi-agent systems, automated negotiation, decision support systems.

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Kakimoto, S., Fujita, K. Effective Automated Negotiation Based on Issue Dendrograms and Partial Agreements. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 27, 201–214 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-018-5364-x

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