In systems composed of multiple autonomous agents, negotiation is a key form of interaction that enables groups of agents to arrive at a mutual agreement regarding some belief, goal or plan, for example. Particularly because the agents are autonomous and cannot be assumed to be benevolent, agents must influence others to convince them to act in certain ways, and negotiation is thus critical for...

Software agents representing supply chain partners make it possible to automate supply chain management and particularly can address the challenging problem of automating the process of dynamic supply chain formation. This paper puts forward an extended contract net mechanism for dynamic supply chain formation and applies it to China petroleum supply chain management, which is characterized by ...

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) based grid superscheduling approach promotes coordinated resource sharing. Superscheduling is facilitated between administratively and topologically distributed grid sites by grid schedulers such as Resource brokers. In this work, we present a market-based SLA coordination mechanism. We based our SLA model on a well known contract net protocol. The key advantag...

The Contract Net Protocol is one of the most prominent concepts for negotiation in Multi-Agent Systems. However , there are some unspecified features like the task decomposition procedures used by managers. Also the bottleneck induced by the central role of the managers will be identified as a weak point of the method. This is especially true if the amount of tasks in the system and the society...

Manufacturing scheduling is a difficult problem, particularly when it takes place in an open, dynamic environment. Agent-based technology has recently been used in attempts to resolve this problem. A bidding mechanism based on Contract Net protocol is often proposed as a key solution component. Our approach is to combine a bidding mechanism based on Contract Net protocol with a mediation mechan...

Conversations are sequences of messages exchanged among interacting agents. For conversations to be meaningful, agents ought to follow commonly known specifications limiting the types of messages that can be exchanged at any point in the conversation. These specifications are usually implemented using conversation policies (which are rules of inference) or conversation protocols (which are pred...

The fast changing environment to which crisis have to face up, impose to frequently change and adapt the process driving crisis resolution. Consequently this process has to be flexible and adaptive. In addition to proposed solutions to deal with process flexibility in business process management, we propose to use Interaction Protocols to integrate human activity into the process driving crisis...