制造业供应链产销协同计划冲突协商模型

面对市场竞争日益剧烈和客户需求多样化的趋势,制造业供应链的制造商和经销商努力实现产销协同计划。然而在产销协同计划中时常出现冲突,及时有效消解冲突,能提高整个供应链的协作效率,改善供应链上企业间的合作关系;反之,会降低供应链的运作效率,削弱供应链的竞争力。针对这类冲突问题,引入让步协商策略,在有限信息共享条件下,建立供应链产销协同计划冲突协商模型;设计具有历史提议回顾特点的协商流程;通过文化基因算法,产生反提议生成策略;通过算例验证文化基因算法及冲突协商模型的有效性。     

基于冲突检测的供应链协同计划

在供应链协同计划中,以供应链整体最优为目标做出的决策有可能引发个体理性和集体理性冲突。针对该问题,在研究供应链协同计划时引入冲突检测方法,建立供应链协同计划冲突检测模型,采用Agent协商技术对检测到的冲突进行消解。仿真实例说明,在供应链协同计划中引入冲突检测方法能及时发现供应链中存在的冲突,有助于提高供应链协同计划的效率和科学性。     

CONCENSUS: multi-party negotiation support for conflict resolution in concurrent engineering design

Advances in telematics have led many manufacturing companies in particular to explore the adoption of groupware technology to improve communication between team members. However, complex activities such as conflict resolution are still predominantly facilitated through face-to-face negotiation meetings. Intelligent software agents technology is being applied to support computer-mediated conflict resolution activities, such as information search and retrieval, recording negotiation process history and task allocation – whilst the creative negotiation activities such as generating new solutions, preventing and detecting conflicts are still left to the human experts. This paper describes the development of a framework for the support of multi-party negotiation for multi-agent systems, which will be introduced through a general overview of the requirements of multi-agent negotiation. Finally, the current architecture of the developed prototype for a CONCurrent Engineering Negotiation SUpport System (CONCENSUS) is presented.     

TOLERANT PLANNING AND NEGOTIATION IN MULTIAGENT ENVIRONMENTS

Tolerant planning improves the likelihood of plans being successfully executed despite uncertainties and changes during execution. By tolerating execution errors, dynamic replanning need not be invoked as often or as immediately as in a less tolerant plan. The approach in designing tolerant plans is to allow for redundancies in the requirements (usually resources) for execution. While this approach is feasible, it raises another problem—more conflicts must be resolved during planning. This conflict resolution problem can be solved using a novel model of iterative negotiation for multiagent coordination. It requires agents to be skillful in negotiating with other agents to resolve conflicts in such a way as to minimize compromising their own tolerance while being benevolent in helping others find a feasible plan. This paper also describes an application of these concepts in a planner that generates conflict-free movement schedules for several mobile robots in a factory domain.     

Approximate resolution of asynchronous conflicts among sequential collaborations in dynamic virtual environments

Asynchronous collaboration for a networked virtual environment (NVE) has emerged as a promising area in collaborative computer‐aided design applications. The concept of asynchronous collaboration is a sequential collaboration of temporal processes in an NVE where the participants are not required to be present at the time of the collaboration. Conflicts in asynchronous collaboration occur because the preceding task of a participant can influence the output of the ensuing task of another participant. The conflicted tasks must be modified manually. However, it requires considerable time and effort to resolve conflicts in a sequential collaboration. In this paper, we present an asynchronous collaborative framework that converts the conflict states of the shared objects into approximately resolved states. We develop a novel approximate resolution algorithm using a task‐based modeling mechanism to resolve the asynchronous conflicts with their corresponding tasks. Moreover, we propose a visual relation editor for convenient management. The participants can set flexible relations among shared objects using the proposed visual editor. The proposed approximate resolution approach can significantly reduce the average resolution time and the number of required manual task resolutions in a virtual environment compared to a manual resolution approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Conflict resolution in business services outsourcing relationships

Many organizations source administrative business services like information technology, human resources, procurement, legal, financial and accounting services through external service providers, a practice known as Business Services Outsourcing (BSO). Many of these relationships are strategic, in the sense that they are large, underpin clients’ business strategies, and the client can become highly dependent on service provider capabilities and performance. The BSO market is over $1 trillion in size and has been growing for two decades. Despite the size and maturity, up to 50% of BSO relationships result in poor outcomes, partly because partners cannot resolve conflicts. Based on interviews with client and provider leads from 13 BSO relationships, we answered the research question: “What types of inter-organizational conflicts arise in BSO relationships and how do partners resolve them?” We extended the prior literature on inter-organizational conflict frameworks by conceptualizing three types of conflicts specific to BSO: commercial conflicts, service conflicts, and relationship conflicts. Conflicts as we study them here are not minor disagreements, but have a strategic dimension. Commercial conflicts were the most serious because outsourcing relationships are firstly commercial transactions—a provider must earn a profit and a client must meet its economic business case to be viable. Theoretically, we found Thomas and Kilmann’s typology of conflict resolution styles to be robust enough to characterize the BSO conflict cases, provided a switched style category was included. In our data, we found that only the collaborative and switched-to-collaborative styles resolved conflicts to the satisfaction of both partners, which is consistent with theory. Novel findings that extend or contest prior theory are identified as part of a future research agenda. For practitioners, we also identified five effective conflict resolution behaviors.     

Cooperative requests and replies in a collaborative dialogue model

In this paper, we present a computational model of dialogue, and an underlying theory of action, which supports the representation of, reasoning about and execution of communicative and non-communicative actions. This model rests on a theory of collaborative discourse, and allows for cooperative human–machine communication in written dialogues. We show how cooperative behaviour, illustrated by the analysis of a dialogue corpus and formalized by an underlying theory of cooperation, is interpreted and produced in our model. We describe and illustrate in detail the main algorithms used to model the reasoning processes necessary for interpretation, planning, generation, as well as for determining which actions to perform and when. Finally, we present our implemented system.Our data are drawn from a corpus of human–human dialogues, selected and transcribed from a day-long recording of phone calls at a phone desk in an industrial setting (Castaing, 1993). We present an analysis of this corpus, focusing on dialogues which require, in order to succeed, helpful behaviour on the part of both the caller and the operator.The theoretical framework of our model rests on the theory of collaborative discourse developed by Grosz and Sidner (1986, 1990), Grosz and Kraus (1993, 1996), and further extended by Lochbaum (1994, 1995). An important objective guiding the design of our dialogue model was to allow the agent being modelled to interpret and manifest a type of cooperative behaviour which follows Grosz and Kraus's formalization of the commitment of each collaborative agent towards the actions of the other collaborative agents. The model we propose extends Lochbaum's approach to discourse processing in extending her interpretation algorithm to allow for the treatment of a wider range of dialogues, and in providing an algorithm of task advancement which guides the generation process and allows for the interleaving of execution and planning, thereby facilitating cooperation among agents. The cooperative behaviour of the agent being modelled rests on the use of communicative actions allowing agents to share additional knowledge and assist each other in performing their actions.     

Sound conflict management and resolution for virtual-enterprise collaborations

For fulfilling customer requests, enterprises are increasingly part of collaboration networks with peers. Such collaborations, also known as virtual enterprises (VE), are governed by pre-defined contracts that restrict the behaviour of each participating enterprise. However, since each enterprise is autonomous, the potential arises for conflicts during collaboration. In this paper, we extend our earlier work on virtual-enterprise modelling and address the existing gap of conflict modelling, management and resolution in VEs. Our approach works as follows: first, to detect a conflict by analysing the exceptions reported during execution; second, to uncover the conflict type, origin and impact of an exception; and third, depending on the nature of an exception, to implement the appropriate conflict negotiation and resolution strategy among the participating entities of a VE. Crucial to this approach, and serving as one of the key contributions of this paper, is the conflict ontology. This ontology helps to model conflict types along with related exceptions, negotiation and resolution strategies, thereby enabling conflict management and resolution. Throughout this paper, we illustrate our ideas with a running example and also present a detailed evaluation based on a case study from the automotive production domain.     

一种基于约束传播的多主体规划算法

提出了一种基于约束传播的分布式多主体规划算法。主体之间的冲突检测与协调通过一种特殊的多主体协商来解决。在确定环境中该算法是可靠的。算法中主体之间交换的只是与冲突有关的动作、因果链和约束，具有通信量小、安全性高的优点。     

Assisting students with argumentation plans when solving problems in CSCL

In CSCL systems, students who are solving problems in group have to negotiate with each other by exchanging proposals and arguments in order to resolve the conflicts and generate a shared solution. In this context, argument construction assistance is necessary to facilitate reaching to a consensus. This assistance is usually provided with isolated arguments by demand, but this does not offer students a real and integral view of the conflicts. In this work, we study the utilisation of argumentation plans to assist a student during the argumentation. The actions of an argumentation plan represent the arguments that a student might use during the argumentation process. Moreover, these plans can be integrated with the tasks needed to reach a shared solution. These plans give the student an integral and intuitive view of the problem resolution and the conflict that must be resolved. We evaluated our proposal with students of an Artificial Intelligence course. This evaluation was carried out by comparing three different assistance scenarios in which students had to solve exercises: no assistance, assistance with isolated arguments, and assistance with argumentation plans. The results obtained show that reaching consensus was easier for the students when the assistance was provided using argumentations plans.     

Fuzzy Constraint-Based Agent Negotiation

Conflicts between two or more parties arise for various reasons and perspectives. Thus, resolution of conflicts frequently relies on some form of negotiation. This paper presents a general problem-solving framework for modeling multi-issue multilateral negotiation using fuzzy constraints. Agent negotiation is formulated as a distributed fuzzy constraint satisfaction problem (DPCSP). Fuzzy constrains are thus used to naturally represent each agent's desires involving imprecision and human conceptualization, particularly when lexical imprecision and subjective matters are concerned. On the other hand, based on fuzzy constraint-based problem-solving, our approach enables an agent not only to systematically relax fuzzy constraints to generate a proposal, but also to employ fuzzy similarity to select the alternative that is subject to its acceptability by the opponents. This task of problem-solving is to reach an agreement that benefits all agents with a high satisfaction degree of fuzzy constraints, and move towards the deal more quickly since their search focuses only on the feasible solution space. An application to multilateral negotiation of a travel planning is provided to demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of our framework.     

基于合同网协议的多智能体虚拟企业协商研究

协商是虚拟企业成员之间协作的实现方式。本文通过对多智能体的协商框架、协商模型和协商过程等进行深入的分析,在合同网协议的基础上构建多智能体协商体系框架,并结合贝叶斯决策方法来建立自学习协商模型。根据协商中的更新信息实时更新智能体信念,实现多智能体协商过程的自学习功能。从而有利于提高协商效率,改善网络通信,保证虚拟企业的敏捷性和协商双方的利益。     

A fundamental approach to model versioning based on graph modifications: from theory to implementation

In model-driven engineering, models are primary artifacts that can evolve heavily during their life cycle. Therefore, versioning of models is a key technique to be offered by integrated development environments for model-driven engineering. In contrast to text-based versioning systems, we present an approach that takes model structures and their changes over time into account. Considering model structures as graphs, we define a fundamental approach where model revisions are considered as graph modifications consisting of delete and insert actions. Two different kinds of conflict detection are presented: (1) the check for operation-based conflicts between different graph modifications, and (2) the check for state-based conflicts on merged graph modifications. For the merging of graph modifications, a two-phase approach is proposed: First, operational conflicts are temporarily resolved by always giving insertion priority over deletion to keep as much information as possible. Thereafter, this tentative merge result is the basis for manual conflict resolution as well as for the application of repair actions that resolve state-based conflicts. If preferred by the user, giving deletion priority over insertion might be one solution. The fundamental concepts are illustrated by versioning scenarios for simplified statecharts. Furthermore, we show an implementation of this fundamental approach to model versioning based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework as technical space.     

The agreement process: an empirical investigation of human–human computer-mediated collaborative dialogs

In this paper, we investigate the empirical correlates of the agreement process. Informally, the agreement process is the dialog process by which collaborators achieve joint commitment on a joint action. We propose a specific instantiation of the agreement process, derived from our theoretical model, that integrates the IRMA framework for rational problem solving (Bratman, Israel & Pollack, 1988) with Clark's (1992, 1996) work on language as a collaborative activity; and from the characteristics of our task, a simple design problem (furnishing a two-room apartment) in which knowledge is equally distributed among agents, and needs to be shared. The main contribution of our paper is an empirical study of some of the components of the agreement process. We first discuss why we believe the findings from our corpus of computer-mediated dialogs are applicable to human–human collaborative dialogs in general. We then present our theoretical model, and apply it to make predictions about the components of the agreement process. We focus on how information is exchanged in order to arrive at a proposal, and on what constitutes a proposal and its acceptance/rejection. Our corpus study makes use of features of both the dialog and the domain reasoning situation, and led us to discover that the notion of commitment is more useful to model the agreement process than that of acceptance/rejection, as it more closely relates to the unfolding of negotiation.     

一种改进的部分全局规划协调机制

在多Agent系统（MAS）中,Agent之间的协调是解决Agent间冲突的关键,本文对如何使Agents能够快速解决冲突达成协商进行了研究,在通用部分全局规划的基础上提出了一种步进式部分全局规划模型,该模型使用增量式策略来使Agents尽快达成协商。实验表明,改进后的模型在冲突的探测和解决上性能都有了显著地提高。     

网管系统策略冲突解决的结果中存在的问题及检测与解决方法

当前，多种方法被用来解决网管系统中的策略冲突，不同方法有不同的应用范围，因此，通常需要综合应用多种方法来解决策略之间的冲突．各种方法解决策略冲突解决的过程是相对独立的，其策略冲突解决的结果也是相对独立的．在解决策略冲突的过程中，难以考虑到已经存在的策略冲突解决结果．因此。不同的策略冲突解决方法的结果之间可能存在冲突．分析了网管系统中多策略冲突解决方法的结果中可能存在的冲突，提出了检测及解决这些冲突的方法，并给出了实验结果及结论．     

基于协商的冲突消解研究

冲突消解是分布式人工智能（ＤＡＩ）系统中主体协调的一个重要方面。在ＤＡＩ系统中各主体的知识库可能存在着不完整性，不一致性，不相容性和不可约性等等，这些特性可能在协作过程中导致冲突。智能主体必须有一定的机制，用于识别和管理这些不一致性，以及消除由此而导致的冲突。本文分析定义了冲突的类型，并提出了协商冲突消解策略。     

Distributed conflict resolution among cooperating expert systems

Abstract: Cooperating experts approach attempts to integrate and coordinate the activities of multiple specialised problem solvers that come together to solve complex tasks such as design, medical diagnosis, business management and so on. Due to the different goals, knowledge and viewpoints of agents, conflicts may arise at any phase of the problem-solving process. Managing diverse expertise requires well-organised models of conflict resolution. In this paper, a model for cooperating experts is described which openly supports multi-agent conflict detection and resolution. The model is based on the idea that each agent has its own conflict knowledge which is separated from its domain level knowledge, and each agent has its own conflict resolution knowledge which is not accessible and known by others. Furthermore, there are no globally known conflict resolution strategies. Each agent involved in a conflict chooses a resolution scheme according to its self interest. The model is described by using an example in the domain of office design and it is compared with other systems.     

Argumentation-based negotiation planning for autonomous agents

When we negotiate, the arguments uttered to persuade the opponent are not the result of an isolated analysis, but of an integral view of the problem that we want to agree about. Before the negotiation starts, we have in mind what arguments we can utter, what opponent we can persuade, which negotiation can finish successfully and which cannot. Thus, we plan the negotiation, and in particular, the argumentation. This fact allows us to take decisions in advance and to start the negotiation more confidently. With this in mind, we claim that this planning can be exploited by an autonomous agent. Agents plan the actions that they should execute to achieve their goals. In these plans, some actions are under the agent's control, while some others are not. The latter must be negotiated with other agents. Negotiation is usually carried out during the plan execution. In our opinion, however, negotiation can be considered during the planning stage, as in real life. In this paper, we present a novel approach to integrate argumentation-based negotiation planning into the general planning process of an autonomous agent. This integration allows the agent to take key decisions in advance. We evaluated this proposal in a multiagent scenario by comparing the performance of agents that plan the argumentation and agents that do not. These evaluations demonstrated that performance improves when the argumentation is planned, specially, when the negotiation alternatives increase.     

Emphasizing conflict resolution versus conflict avoidance during schedule generation

Classical planning systems attempt to solve a planning problem by avoiding possible conflicts before the actions are put on a timeline. This is computationally very expensive and the search for all possible future conflicts may be prohibitive. A conflict resolution approach can check for immediate conflicts and try conflict resolution strategies as each activity is put on a timeline without regard for possible future conflicts. A more practical approach is to use a combination of conflict avoidance and conflict resolution based upon heuristics which limit the amount of search required when either is used. Because humans are not good at solving problems which require complex lookahead, this combined approach, with emphasis on conflict resolution, is what human schedulers actually use when they develop schedules. A system which simulates this human approach to scheduling has been developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for scheduling satellite activities. This system, which includes the Planning And Resource Reasoning (PARR) shell, allows expert schedulers to specify conflict resolution strategies as well as conflict avoidance strategies to be used during the scheduling process. PARR has been used since May 1987 to schedule the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System services for the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite. PARR will also be used to schedule platform resources on the Explorer Platform, scheduled for launch in early 1992. This paper describes the advantages of using a combined conflict avoidance and resolution approach in a satellite scheduling system.