An Implementation Model of a Declarative Framework for Automated Negotiation

Abstract

The subject of automated negotiations has received a lot of attention in the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) research community. Most work in this field on the auction design space, on its parametrization and on mechanisms for specific types of auctions. One of the problems that have been recently addressed consists in developing a generic negotiation protocol (GNP) capable of governing the interaction between agents that participate in any type of auction. Though much has been said on this matter, the current results stop at the XML representation of specific negotiation mechanisms. In this paper we propose a declarative approach for specifying a generic auction protocol by using Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents and the Jason programming language to represent the entities that communicate in an auction. In order to validate the claim on the generality of the proposed approach we have used the GNP to model two negotiation mechanisms: one for the English auction and one for the Dutch auction.