Efficient negotiation strategies in multi-agent meeting scheduling

In meeting scheduling problem, the agents negotiate meeting times on behalf of their users. In majority of the works on meeting scheduling, the negotiation protocols do not consider scenario when some agents are busy. They do not have mechanism to identify the busy agents. But in the real-life scenario, all the users are not equally busy. In an attempt to overcome this limitation, we have designed our negotiation protocols in such a way that busy agents get more chance to propose a solution to the meeting. This improves the efficiency of negotiation. We have implemented these protocols in a prototype provided by JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) development community. We have also presented experimental results demonstrating the efficiency of these protocols.