AAMAS'09
This tutorial aims to give a broad overview of multi-agent complex negotiations for intractable negotiation problems. This tutorial will be the 2nd part of the workshop on Agent-mediated electronic negotiation. Thus the audience should be familiar with with very basic notions of agent-mediated electronic negotiation, as covered in the overview in part 1 of the tutorial. Here we look, in more depth, the following important issues in electronic negotiation. One of the most important notion in intractable negotiation problem is "multi-issue negotiation". Part 1 will show the brief overview of multi-issue negotiation. In this Part 2, we especially forcus on multi-issue negotiations which may have realistic limitations like time-constraints, computational tractablility, private information issues, online negotiations, etc.
This tutorial is based on our successful tutorial in AAMAS08 on "Complex negotiations for intractable problems (agent-mediated electronic negotiatoin: Part 2).
1. Introduction. Basic definition(s). Complex negotiation for intractable problems
Presentater : Takayuki Ito and Shaheen Fatima
2. Utility models for multi-issue negotiations:
Presentater : Takayuki Ito and Shaheen Fatima
a. Liniear (Aggregated) model
b. Complex model 1 : Non-linear model
C. Complex model 2 : Constraint-based model
Providing utility models is important, since many papers focus on a specific class of utility models. It also help us to give a preview the rest of the presentation.
3. Complex Multi-issue negotiation with Time deadline
Presentater : Shaheen Fatima
a.Procedures for negotiating multiple issues
b.The role of agendas in multi-issue negotiation
c.Computationally hard negotiation
4. A Bidding-based method for Complex Multi-Issue Negotiation
Presentater : Takayuki Ito
a. Mediator-based multi-issue negotiation
b. Maximizing Social Welfare by Bidding.
c. The Issues on Scalability
d. Clustering-based Complex Multi-Issue Negotiation
A Bidding-based method is the basic negotiation for complex utility model 2 (Constraint-based model), and the basis for the rest of this presentiations. Thus, we forcus on the details of the bidding-based method for complex multi-issue negotiations.
5. Tackling against Scalability and Minimizing to Reveal Private information.
Presentater : Takayuki Ito
a. Democratic agreement method may help the protocol to be scalable and preserving privacy.
b. Fairness in terms of revealing private information.
c. Adopting multi-party protocol for preserving total privacy.
Overall, privacy and scalability is the most important issue in many-to-many complex multi-issue negotiations. We will introduce the state of art method for preserving privacy which getting better social welfare. Also, for scalability, some ideas based on democratic agreement method will be preseted.
Finally, in order to delimitate our tutorial from other possible proposals, we find it useful to describe what our tutorial does NOT intend to cover, as Part 1 did. It will not cover auction protocols /mechanism design issues - which represent a related, but different area of research. These are no doubt important, but we need to focus our presentation on our field of expertise and we already have a wide research area to cover in the limited time available for a tutorial. A tutorial on mechanism design and auctions has been offered in the past at AAMAS, by researchers which are experts in this line of research. It may be offered again - but there is no danger of overlap in contents with our proposal.
Also, we will not cover argumentation-based negotiation (except perhaps mention them in the initial classification). Argumentation methods typically use logic and formal reasoning, and thus represent a different class of mechanisms from bargaining, which are usually based on game-theory, machine learning or other heuristics.
Biography of the presenters
Dr. Takayuki ITO received the B.E., M.E, and Doctor of Engineering from the Nagoya Institute of Technology in 1995, 1997, and 2000, respectively. From 1999 to 2001, he was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). From 2000 to 2001, he was a visiting researcher at USC/ISI (University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute). From April 2001 to March 2003, he was an associate professor of Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). He joined Nagoya Institute of Technology as an associate professor of Graduate School of Engineering in April 2003. From 2005 to 2006, he is a visiting researcher at Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University and a visiting researcher at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2008, he is a visiting scientist at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the Young Scientists' Prize, The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Ministery of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, 2007, the Nagao Special Research Award of the Information Processing Society of Japan, 2007, the Best Paper Award of AAMAS2006, the 2005 Best Paper Award from Japan Society for Software Science and Technology, the Best Paper Award in the 66th annual conference of 66th Information Processing Society of Japan, and the Super Creator Award of 2004 IPA Exploratory Software Creation Projects. His main research interests include multi-agent systems, intelligent agents, group decision support systems, and agent-mediated electronic commerce.
Dr Shaheen Fatima joined the Department of Computer Science at Loughborough University (UK) as Lecturer in 2007. Prior to this, she was Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. During this period, she worked on a range of projects dealing with multiagent systems and negotiation. Her research interests include multi-agent systems, negotiation, game theory, and mechanism design. She has over 35 publications in the area. She has reviewed papers for a number of journals and been on the PC/SPC for AAMAS, AAAI, ICEC, and AMEC/TADA.
For a full list of publications of the presenters, please see:
Takayuki Ito : http://www.mta.nitech.ac.jp/~ito/, http://www.mit.edu/~takayuki
Shaheen Fatima : http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~cossf/index.htm
Contact information for the presenters:
Takayuki Ito, Ph.D.
(1)Visiting Scientist,
Center for Collective Intelligence,
Sloan School of Management,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
5 Cambridge Center, NE25-749A,
Cambridge, Massachusetss, MA 02142, US.
URL: http://www.mit.edu/~takayuki/
Phone: +1-617-452-4523
(2)Associate Professor,
Nagoya Institute of Technology
Shikumi-college, Nagoya Institute of Technology,
Gokiso Showa-ku, Nagoya 466-8555, Japan.
E-mail: ito.takayuki@nitech.ac.jp
URL: http://www.mta.ics.nitech.ac.jp/~ito/
Phone: +81-52-735-7968
FAX: +81-52-735-5584
Shaheen S. Fatima, Ph.D.
Lecturer,
Department of Computer Science,
Loughborough University,
Loughborough LE11 3TU,
United Kingdom,
Email: S.S.Fatima@lboro.ac.uk
URL: http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~cossf/index.htm
Phone: +44 (0) 1509 222 677
Fax: +44 (0) 1509 211 586