CCL: expressions of choice in agent communication

Abstract

When shall I fly to New York? Which airline should I choose? How are these related to which airport I arrive at, to how I might travel into the city and to where I choose to stay? Many current and potential applications of agents involve reasoning and communicating about multiple interellated choices. To date however, most proposals for communication in agent systems have provided little or no direct support for the type of communication required by these applications. To address this need, this paper describes the Constraint Choice Language (CCL) -an agent Content Language designed to support agent problem solving by providing explicit representations of choices and choice problems.

A fuzzy constraint based model for bilateral, multi-issue negotiations in semi-competitive environments

“…The communication ports of our seller and buyer agents consist of a pair of messages the two agents present to one another. As is common in the field [59], we separate the representation of messages between agents into two levels-the communication language level and the content language level.…”

“…(2) At the content language level, a seller's offer is a solution (a product specified by a compound label on the attributes of products) to a CSP, plus any associated information (its attached restriction condition or associated reward). Given the fact that the message content of a buyer's offer contains constraints, we choose to base our content language on the Constraint Choice Language [59] since this is specifically designed for carrying, between agents, constraints or solutions to CSPs. This language needs a minor extension for our purposes in order for it to have the ability to contain information about the attached restriction and associated reward of a product.…”

Acquiring user tradeoff strategies and preferences for negotiating agents: A default-then-adjust method

“…Since the human user can also be regarded as an agent (although not a software one), the communication interface between the acquisition agent and its user consists of a set of messages they send to one another. As is common in the field of agent communication (Willmott et al, 2000), we separate the representation of these messages into the communication language level and the content language level.…”