A Multiple Negotiations Model Considering Interdependence between Discrete Issues Across Negotiations  

作　　者：Lei Niu Litian Huang Jinhua Zhao Xinguo Yu 

机构地区：[1]Central China Normal University Wollongong Joint Institute,Central China Normal University,Wuhan,430000,China [2]School of Economics and Management,Wuhan University,Wuhan,430000,China [3]National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning&Central China Normal University Wollongong Joint Institute,Central China Normal University,Wuhan,430000,China

出　　处：《Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering》2021年第4期417-432,共16页系统科学与系统工程学报（英文版）

基　　金：This work has been supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.62006090;the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities,CCNU under Grant No.3110120001.

摘　　要：The research of multiple negotiations considering issue interdependence across negotiations is considered as a complex research topic in agent negotiation. In the multiple negotiations scenario, an agent conducts multiple negotiations with opponents for different negotiation goals, and issues in a single negotiation might be interdependent with issues in other negotiations. Moreover, the utility functions involved in multiple negotiations might be nonlinear, e.g., the issues involved in multiple negotiations are discrete. Considering this research problem, the current work may not well handle multiple interdependent negotiations with complex utility functions, where issues involved in utility functions are discrete. Regarding utility functions involving discrete issues, an agent may not find an offer exactly satisfying its expected utility during the negotiation process. Furthermore, as sub-offers on issues in every single negotiation might be restricted by the interdependence relationships with issues in other negotiations, it is even harder for the agent to find an offer satisfying the expected utility and all involved issue interdependence at the same time, leading to a high failure rate of processing multiple negotiations as a final outcome. To resolve this challenge, this paper presents a negotiation model for multiple negotiations, where interdependence exists between discrete issues across multiple negotiations. By introducing the formal definition of “interdependence between discrete issues across negotiations”, the proposed negotiation model applies the multiple alternating offers protocol, the clustered negotiation procedure and the proposed negotiation strategy to handle multiple interdependent negotiations with discrete issues. In the proposed strategy, the “tolerance value” is introduced as an agent’s consideration to balance between the overall negotiation goal and the negotiation outcomes. The experimental results show that, 1) the proposed model well handles the multiple negotiations wit

关 键 词：multiple negotiations discrete issues interdependence relationships nonlinear utility functions 

分 类 号：O158[理学—数学]