An Extended Multi-agent Negotiation Protocol

Samir Aknine (1) , Suzanne Pinson (2) , Melvin Shakun (3)

1 SMA - Systèmes Multi-Agents
2 LAMSADE - Laboratoire d'analyse et modélisation de systèmes pour l'aide à la décision
3 NYU Stern - Leonard N. Stern School of Business

This article presents a task allocation protocol that is efficient in time and tolerates crash failures in multi-agent systems. The protocol is an extension of the negotiation protocol defined by Smith and Davis [25, 26] for task allocation. Our extension of the Contract Net Protocol (1) enables an agent to manage several negotiation processes in parallel; (2) optimizes the length of the negotiation processes among agents; (3) reduces the contractors' decommitment situations; (4) enables the detection of failures of an agent participating in a negotiation process and prevents a negotiation process with blocked agents.

Mots clés: Multi-Agent Sytems; contract-net protocol; negotiation protocol

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Samir Aknine, Suzanne Pinson, Melvin Shakun. An Extended Multi-agent Negotiation Protocol. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2004, 8 (1), pp.5-45. ⟨10.1023/B:AGNT.0000009409.19387.f8⟩. ⟨hal-01169892⟩