Negotiation and conflict resolution within a community of cooperative agents

UPShell, a tool for building up coarse grain semiautonomous cooperating agents (which are expert systems) is presented. Negotiation and conflict resolution protocols have been integrated into the agents, whose architecture is also presented. Several basic functionalities dealing with task scheduling as well as cooperation policies are briefly specified. A realistic scenario, involving a sophisticated electricity distribution network management application, is presented to illustrate the concepts and tool features.<
>