The Role of Commitment in Cooperative Negotiation

Cooperative information agents need mechanisms that enable them to work together eeectively while solving common problems. We investigate the use of commitment by agents to proposed actions as a mechanism that allow agents to work concurrently on interdependent problems. Judicious use of commitment can not only increase the throughput of cooperative information systems, but also allow them to deal exibly with dynamically changing environments. We use the domain of distributed scheduling to demonstrate that static commitment strategies are ineeective. Results from simulated experiments are used to identify the environmental features on which an adaptive commitment strategy should be predicated.