A Negotiation Approach for Mobile Agents Used in Managing Telecommunication Network Services

摘要

This paper presents the work done within the MIAMI project, which focus on fundamental challenges concerning management of telecommunications networks, more specifically it focus on the issues involved when multiple mobile agents interact in multiagent systems. The application is an intelligent market place for the MIAMI platform [1], where agents representing different domains of the MIAMI framework cooperate and compete to process sales transactions for their owners. The market place manager acts as a facilitator by giving necessary information to agents and managing communication between agents, and also as a mediator by proposing solutions to agents or stopping them to get into infinite loops bargaining back and forth. The buyer and seller agents range from using hardcoded logic to rule-based inferencing in their negotiation strategies. However these agents must support some communication skills using KQML or FIPA-ACL. So in contrast with other approaches to multiagent negotiation, we introduce an explicit mediator (market place manager) into the negotiation, and we propose a negotiation strategy based on dependence theory [2][3] implemented by our buyers and sellers.