Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-04-10 Abstract

Modelling Agents Behaviour in Automated Negotiation
Techreport ID: kmi-04-10
Date: 2004
Author(s): Chongming Hou

This paper presents a learning mechanism that applies nonlinear regression analysis to model a negotiation agents behaviour based only on the opponent's previous offers. The behaviour of negotiation agents in this study is determined by their tactics in the form of decision functions. Heuristics based on estimates of an agents tactics are drawn from a series of experiments. By applying the nonlinear regression and the obtained heuristic knowledge, an agent can improve their overall performance by predicting the opponents deadline and reservation value, terminating pointless negotiation, and avoiding negotiation breakdown. The findings of this study show that this approach can be used to obtain better deals than previously proposed tactics. The learning mechanism can be used online, without any prior knowledge about the other agents and is therefore, very useful in open systems where agents have little or no information about each other.

Future Internet

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Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection