Enclosed are some annotations and some further papers:
Sandholm, T. and Lesser, V. (1995). On Automated Contracting in Multi-enterprise Manufacturing. Proceedings of Conference on Improving Manufacturing Performance in a Distributed Enterprise: Advanced Systems and Tools, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Sandholm, T. and Lesser, V. (1995). Issues in Automated Negotiation and Electronic Commerce: Extending the Contract Net Framework. In Proceedings of First International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-95), San Francisco: AAAI Press, pp. 328-335
Sandholm, T. W. and Lesser, V.R. (1995). Advantages of a Leveled Commitment Contracting Protocol. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1. Portland, Oregon, AAAI Press/MIT Press, pp. 126-133. (Extended version appeared as University of Massachusetts /Amherst Computer Science Technical Report #95-72.)
These papers discusses how the contract-net protocol can be extended to work with self-interested agents. There are three important focuses to the paper: 1) how deal with bounded-rationality of agents in terms of their inability to completely analyze and process all bids and task announcements; 2) how to deal with multi-linked contracts and 3) how to introduce multi-stage negotiation process into the contract-net protocol. An important ideas introduced in this paper is the idea of "leveled" commitment" contracting where agents can pay pre-negotiated amounts of money (decided as part of the initial contracting process) to unilaterally decommit from a contract.
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Chia, M.H., Neiman, D.E. and Lesser, V.R. (1998). Coordinating Asynchronous Agent Activities in a Distributed Scheduling System. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS'98).
Neiman, D., Hildum, D., Lesser, V. and Sandholm, T. (1994). Exploiting Meta-level Information in a Distributed Scheduling System. Proceedings of Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Discusses how a set of cooperative distributed scheduler agents, each responsible for a heteregeneous collection of resources, can lend resources from other agents in order to make up shortfall in their own resources to cover the jobs that they are responsible for. The key idea is generate texture measures about the current resource assignments and potential resource requirements and then transmit these among the agents. This meta-level information is then used to make decisions about how to assign local resources and when and where to ask for resources from another agent.
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Lander, S. and Lesser, V. (1997). Sharing Meta-Information to Guide Cooperative Search Among Heterogeneous Reusable Agents. In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 9(2), pp. 193-208.
Lander, S. and Lesser, V. (1993). Understanding the Role of Negotiation in Distributed Search Among Heterogeneous Agents. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Chambery, France.
Lander, S. and Lesser, V. (1992). Customizing Distributed Search Among Agents with Heterogeneous Knowledge. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 335-344, Baltimore, MD.
Lander, S. and Lesser, V. (1992). Negotiated Search: Organizing Cooperative Search Among Heterogeneous Expert Agents. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Applications in Manufacturing and Robotics, Cancun, Mexico.
Lander, S.E., Lesser, V.R. and Connell, M.E. "Knowledge-Based Conflict Resolution for Cooperation Among Expert Agents." In Computer-Aided Cooperative Product Development, D. Sriram, R. Logcher, and S. Fukuda (eds.), Springer Verlag, 1991.
This collection of papers by Lander et. al deal with how a cooperative set of design agents, each responsible for a different component of the artificat being designed, can work together with each other to arrive at a satisfactory design. The overall system is called TEAM. The agents work in the context of a set of alternative partial designs held in a common workspace (blackboard). This work explorers the use of negotiation protocols for agents to decide when and what constraints they need to relax in order to arrive at an overall solution that is acceptable to all agents.
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Lâasri, B., Lâasri, H., Lander, S. and Lesser, V. (1992). A Generic Model for Intelligent Negotiating Agents. International Journal on Intelligent Cooperative Information Systems , 1(2):291-317.
This paper tries to assess the role of negotiation in multi-agent system. It introduces a model of agent interactions that combines and extends the classic task-sharing model and result-sharing model for cooperative agent interaction. Using this model is discuss where negotiation is needed. As part of this effort, the paper layout a generic model for cooperative agent negotiation discussing the type and character of information that is exchanged among agents during negotiation.
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Moehlman, T., Lesser, V. and Buteau, B. (1992). Decentralized Negotiation: An Approach to the Distributed Planning Problem. Group Decision and Negotiation 1:2, K. Sycara (ed.), pp. 161-192. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Introduces a multi-stage negotation protocol, DENEGOT, in which agents, using a lattice of local constraints of decreasing importance, search these lattices in order to find a satisficing solution. The protocol invovles a number of stages and each stage involves the transmission of information among agents to help focus the local searches and decide when constraints need to be relaxed. The use of the protocol in two implemented domains, scheduling and planning, are discussed.
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Conry, S.E., Kuwabara, K., Lesser, V.R. and Meyer, R.A. (1991). Multistage Negotiation in Distributed Constraint Satisfaction. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 21(6):1462-1477, Nov/Dec 1991.
I assume Susan will cover this! (Carl if Susan hasn't I will write something)
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Durfee, E.H. and Lesser, V.R., "Negotiating Task Decomposition and Allocation Using Partial Global Planning,'' Distributed Artificial Intelligence, M. Huhns and L. Gasser (eds.), Vol. 2, Pitman Publishing Ltd., London, England, 1989, pp. 229-244.
I assume Ed will cover this.! (Carl if Ed hasn't I will write something)
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