Special issue on negotiation and scheduling mechanisms for multiagent systems

摘要

Automated negotiation among software agents is becoming increasingly important because automated interactions among agents can occur in many different contexts. For instance, designing agents that can negotiate deals on behalf of human traders is essential for developing the next generation of e-commerce and e-trading systems. More recently, bargaining and negotiation mechanisms have been applied as economic models to resource management in a Grid computing platform. Additionally, recent studies seem to focus on completely open and highly uncertain environments in which agent systems are applied to the real world. In engineering practical negotiation agents, issues such as reliability and robustness are essential in addition to the more traditional notion of rationality (in the sense of being utility optimizing). Furthermore, scheduling in multiagent systems is essential in team formation for task allocation and cooperation. With agents assuming different roles, scheduling among agents is needed for forming teams to effectively accomplish simultaneous joint tasks in dynamic environments.