An Automated Methodology For Negotiation Behavior in Multi-Agent Engineering Applications

• Main Author: Jarrah, Moath
• Other Authors: Zeigler, Bernard P
• Language: EN
• Published: The University of Arizona. 2008
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/193528

The ability to manage and exploit geographically distributed systems of service providers is rather limited in today engineering solutions. Existing techniques suffer from three main problems: first, current techniques cannot provide brokering in managing loosely coupled service providers. Second, the engineering design of existing management tools does not provide enough expressive capabilities for varying user behaviors or when different domains are encountered. Third, lack of interaction between different requestors and providers yields inefficient and very costly agreements. In this thesis, we will present an automated Domain-Independent Marketplace architecture that allows user agents to interact with provider agents using two simple and yet powerful negotiation protocols which define the rules of interactions in multi-agent environments. Having a trusted third party marketplace supports privacy and transparency among collaborative agents and service providers. Service providers have different capabilities depending on the domain of interest. Such providers can be radar sensors as in oceanography surveillance systems, print servers in distributed printing jobs community, or they can be online stores providing products on the web in the E-commerce domain. In order to provide negotiation in different domains, a dynamic message structuring capability is needed. A key role to support such an expressive power is to design an ontology that contains specialization relations between the different domains of interest. The automation of integrating the Domain-Dependent message structure Ontology with the Domain-Independent marketplace architecture gives the designer a powerful tool in which systems can be tailored based on the operational purposes and objectives.The System Entity Structure (SES) methodology, which is a formalism to define hierarchical relations among entities, is used to build the required message structures Ontology automatically through the creation of SES natural language. The architecture design of the Marketplace suggests different phases and functionalities which are mapped and implemented using the Discrete Event System Specifications (DEVS). DEVS/Service Oriented Architecture (DEVS/SOA) is used to validate our system and show a proof of the concept by deploying models of printing jobs in a web-services multi-server environment for printing server domain.