For efficient and informative coordination of agents especially in electronic commerce environment, a time-bound agent negotiation framework is proposed utilizing a time-based commitment scheme. By attaching commitment duration to agent Ž . messages, the traditional contract net protocol is extended to a time-bound negotiation framework TBNF . The proposed negotiation framework has a new messag...

Recent work in communications and business modeling emphasizes a commitment-based view of interaction. By abstracting away from implementation-level details, commitments can potentially enhance perspicuity during modeling and flexibility during enactment. We address the problem of creating commitment-based specifications that directly capture business requirements, yet apply in distributed sett...

The creation of open agent-mediated electronic marketplaces requires new architectures, capable of coping with unreliable computational and network infrastructures, limited trust among independently developed agents, and the possibility of systemic failures. In analogy with civil human societies, open marketplaces will benefit from the introduction of appropriate electronic social institutions,...

For the efficient and informative coordination of multiple agents, a time-bounded agent negotiation framework is proposed utilizing time-based commitment scheme. By attaching the commitment duration to agent messages, the traditional Contract Net Protocol is extended to a time-bounded environment, thereby giving rise to a Time-Bounded Negotiation Framework (TBNF). The proposed negotiation frame...

In this paper, we present and discuss a generic scheme for multi-agent cooperation. It integrates mission planning and task reenement as well as cooperative mechanisms adapted from the Contract Net Protocol framework. The use of this paradigm in a hierarchical manner is also analyzed. In addition, the properties of this cooperative scheme are discussed. Finally, this scheme is illustrated throu...

We describe a new adaptive manager-side control policy for the contract net protocol for a massively multi-agent system (MMAS). To improve overall performance of MMAS, tasks must be allocated to appropriate agents. From this viewpoint, a number of negotiation protocols were proposed in the MAS context, but most assume a small-scale, unbusy environment. We previously reported that, using contrac...

This paper presents a novel approach towards showing how contractor in agent-based simulation for complex warfare system such as multi-sensor battlefield reconnaissance system can be selected in Contract Net Protocol (CNP) with high efficiency. We first analyze agent and agent-based simulation framework, CNP and collaborators, and present agents interaction chain used to actualize CNP and estab...

Building conversation protocols has traditionally been an art more than a science, as their construction is often guided by designers’ intuition rather than by a principled approach. In this paper we present a model for building conversation protocols using inference principles that allow the computational specification and verification of message sequencing and turn-taking. This model, which i...

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 di...

In an agent-based manufacturing system, a production schedule is developed through negotiation between system agents. With the Contract-net protocol that has been employed as an agent-based negotiation mechanism for many years, cooperation arises in the relationship between resource and job agents as they work to create these schedules. However, the interactions among the resource agents themse...