Concurrent Negotiation among Capable Agents

Negotiation is one of agent's key social abilities and an effective approach for multi-agent systems to achieve their targets. For efficiency concern, negotiation should occur among only those with target-related expertise and it should be concurrent. This paper presents a self-organizing concurrent negotiation model which allows an agent to identify those with related expertise via consensus before concurrently negotiating with them. This process can be repeated till an agreement is reached or the negotiation fails. Furthermore, the agents' problem solving ability could also be enhanced via information exchange during this process. Preliminary experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of this model.