Automated contracting in distributed manufacturing among independent companies

So far, most distributed scheduling systems have been designed for cooperative agents, and are inappropriate for self-interested agents, as for example in inter-firm interactions such as virtual enterprises. This paper discusses issues that arise in extending automated contracting to operate among such self-interested agents. We construct a leveled commitment contracting protocol that allows self-interested agents to efficiently accommodate future events by having the possibility of unilaterally decommitting from a contract based on local reasoning. A decommitment penalty is assigned to both agents in a contract to be freed from the contract, an agent only pays this penalty to the other party. It is formally shown that this leveled commitment feature in a contracting protocol increases Pareto efficiency of deals and can enable contracts by making them individually rational when no full commitment contract can. The analysis is nontrivial because self-interested agents decommit manipulatively a Nash equilibrium analysis of the decommitting game is necessary.     

Time-bound negotiation framework for electronic commerce agents

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 messages, the traditional contract net protocol is extended to a time-bound negotiation framework (TBNF). The proposed negotiation framework has a new message type which allows for parties to agree upon the extension of a commitment duration, and a novel commitment concept in the form of negative commitment. The semantics of the messages with the commitment duration are interpreted, and then the three typical negotiation protocols are formally defined and compared — nothing-guaranteed protocol, acceptance-guaranteed protocol, and finite-time guarantee protocol — which can be incorporated into TBNF. The TBNF should provide a background for efficient and effective electronic commerce negotiation while accommodating each agent's adaptive negotiation strategy.     

Service Discovery and Negotiation With COWS

To provide formal foundations to current (web) services technologies, we put forward using COWS, a process calculus for specifying, combining and analysing services, as a uniform formalism for modelling all the relevant phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, deployment and execution. In this paper, we show that constraints and operations on them can be smoothly incorporated in COWS, and propose a disciplined way to model multisets of constraints and to manipulate them through appropriate interaction protocols. Therefore, we demonstrate that also QoS requirement specifications and SLA achievements, and the phases of dynamic service discovery and negotiation can be comfortably modelled in COWS. We illustrate our approach through a scenario for a service-based web hosting provider.     

Agent-based multimedia presentation and adaptation service

In this paper, we aim to provide adaptive multimedia services especially video ones to end-users in an efficient and secure manner. Users moving outside the office should be able to maintain an office-like environment at their current locations. First, the agents within our proposed architecture negotiate the different communication and interaction factors autonomously and dynamically. Moreover, we needed to develop a user agent in addition to service and system agents that could negotiate the requirements and capabilities at run time to furnish best possible service results. Thus we designed and integrated a video indexing and key framing service within our overall agent-based architecture. We integrated this video indexing and content-based analysis service to adapt the video content according to run time conditions. We designed a video XML schema to validate the media content out of this multimedia service according to specific requirements and features, as we will describe later.

并行设计中冲突的协商解决研究

针对并行设计中冲突协商策略的选取和优化解的非唯一性问题,给出了冲突的数学描述形式以及冲突原因的数学解释,证明了合作策略的优越性,研究了基于Nash定理的冲突协商解的存在性和唯一性,并给出一种协商模型以及具体应用实例.     

浅析项目引导、任务驱动教学法在高职商务谈判课程中的应用

为了改变商务谈判传统教学重理论轻实践的弊端和实现高职教育人才培养目标,高职院校应在商务谈判教学中引入项目引导、任务驱动教学法,按照企业商务谈判工作流程将商务谈判课程内容分为三个项目和12个任务进行教学,以此促进学生实践能力的提高。     

基于遗传算法的关联议题并发谈判

基于遗传算法的并发谈判在电子商务应用中具有独特的优势,但已有的研究尚未考虑议题之间的相关性、动态权重的变化规则依赖于对手信息的获取,极大地限制了其使用价值.对此,提出议题分组的方法以解决议题的相关性问题,而议题权重的变化则采取从历史资源中发掘知识的方法进行动态调整.构建了基于遗传算法的关联性议题并发谈判模型,给出了模型的形式化描述、谈判算法设计和动态权重更新方案.通过对模型的实验和比较分析,证实了该方案能够更方便地满足用户谈判的多样性需求,解决谈判中议题关联性的问题,而且能够快速、有效地得出最优谈判结果.     

多目标进化算法在主体自动协商中的应用

研究多主体系统中主体之间的协商协议和通信协议,分析一对一协商模型,该模型采用响应型策略和慎思型策略进行协商。考虑协商双方的偏好和最大化己方的效用值,建立多目标进化算法,构造主体的预提供方案集及其支配子集,实现多主体自动协商。实验结果验证了该方法的有效性。     

主从履带复合式机器人越障研究

针对机器人越障过程中的重心位置变化情况,提出一种主从履带复合式机器人越障研究方法。给出机器人样机模型,研究样机的重心变化规律和主履带系统链轮的负载扭矩变化规律,并进行越障和楼梯仿真分析。仿真结果表明,重心变化是影响越障和爬越楼梯成功与否的关键因素,样机重心位置发生变化时,履带系统链轮转矩将出现最大值。     

多Agent谈判：一种基于模糊逻辑控制的方法

在分析各种Agent谈判模型不足的基础上，首先给出基于黑板模式的谈判Agent体系结构，然后设计了一个通用的谈判Agent建议的综合评价方法。此外，应用标准可加性模型原理设计了谈判Agent的策略模型，从而构建了应用范围广泛的自动化谈判Agent模型。