A Task-Swap Negotiation Protocol Based on the Contract Net Paradigm

In this paper we propose a market-like negotiation protocol which extends the wellknown Contract Net Protocol to cope with domains where task swap is the only possible type of contract. The agents we consider are heterogeneous and self-interested. The absence of an explicit support for utility transfer determines interesting implications on efficiency and stability; in particular, we propose different design alternatives induced by different compositions of the announcement and the bid, and discusses the strategies supported. Task swapping is more feasible than task selling for many realistic applications; symbolic path planning in autonomous robotic agents is the application on which we focus the description of our approach.