Combining Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Automated Negotiations

Automated negotiation is a key issue to facilitate e-Business. It is an on-going research area and attracts attention from both research communities and industry. In this paper, we propose a multiple-stage co-operative automated negotiation architecture, including a sophisticated negotiation strategy and protocol, to resolve the agents' conflicts. This proposed architecture attempts to address the search for joint efficiency for negotiating agents in large and complex problem spaces using a co-evolutionary method. A game theoretic method is adapted to distribute the payoffs generated from the co-evolutionary method. The architecture supports interactions between the two methods to demonstrate that high-quality solutions can be found through their complimentary functions. Using the structure it is possible to refine and explore potential agreements through an iterated process. This article also reports some experimental results and discussions. Jen-Hsiang Chen obtained his MSc degree in Management of Information Technology from Sunderland University. He is a Ph.D. student within the Distributed Systems and Modelling Research Group in the School of Mathematical and Information Sciences at Coventry University. His research project is related to game theory and heuristic approaches in automated negotiation. Kuo-Ming Chao obtained both of his MSc and Ph.D. degrees from Sunderland University, UK. After getting his Ph.D. degree, he has been working at Engineering Design Centre, Newcastle University, UK as research associate. He joined School of Mathematical and Information Sciences, Coventry University as senior lecturer in 2000. He is currently the leader of Distributed System and Modelling Research Group within the school. His research interests include Multi-Agent systems, Web Services, and Grid Computing. Nick Godwin graduated in Mathematics at London University. He obtained a masters degree and a doctorate through the Mathematics Institute at Warwick University. Since that time he has worked at Coventry University, participating in a number of research projects associated with the application of Computing to Manufacturing. Recently he has been working with the Distributed Systems and Modelling Research Group in the School of Mathematical and Information Sciences at Coventry University. Von-Wun Soo graduated from Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University. He got his master degree in Biomedical Engineering and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers, USA. After getting his PhD degree, he has been doing research and teaching as a faculty in Department of Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University, Hsin Chu, Taiwan. Recently, he has been working with coordination and ontology for multi-agent systems in various application domains such as context aware travelling information service, historical information extraction, biological and genomic knowledge management, and creative engineering design.