Preference Revision in Multi-agent Negotiations

One way to address preferences in Multi-Agent negotiation scenarios, is to devise a strategy for removal of contradictions, which may arise when the preferences of all agents are put together. This paper contributes towards that goal by proposing a methodology, based on declarative diagnosis, that minimizes the losses of all agents (i.e. the number of preferences they have to yield in order to find a consensus) as negotiations are iterated; in other words, it will bias negotiations towards cooperation. Instead of considering explicit priorities among agents and/or preferences, the method herein presented proposes a dynamical approach (i.e. with memory of history). A cost function that considers generic features of the solution (e.g. the quantity of preferences relinquished by agents) is employed in order to obtain a generic approach, avoiding excessive use of application dependent parameters.