A simulation approach based on negotiation and cooperation between agents: a case study

This paper begins by presenting AGENDA, a simulation tool developed for the simulation and design of applications involving interacting entities. This testbed consists of two different levels, the architecture level and the system-development level. The architecture level describes a methodology for designing software agents by providing several important functionalities an agent should have. On the other hand, the system-development level provides the basic knowledge-representation formalism, general inference mechanisms, and simulation tool-box supporting visualization and monitoring of agents. Following this, the applicability of AGENDA to the transportation domain is presented in detail. The main challenge of AGENDA in the context of this domain has been to provide different cooperation-scalable methods based on negotiation, leading to different scheduling mechanisms, and to experimentally evaluate these mechanisms. This evaluation shows that: 1) AGENDA is suitable for the realistic application of the transportation domain; 2) mechanisms used for the vertical negotiation (between trucks considered as agents) and for the horizontal negotiation (between companies considered as agents) are applicable for the real-world application of the transportation domain. Finally, a complete study of the scalability of the simulation tool and the algorithms used for the negotiation is presented. This study, with the evaluation of the different mechanisms, can help designers of transportation companies, particularly in the case of large companies.