Extending Propositional Logic with Concrete Domains for Multi-issue Bilateral Negotiation

Abstract

We present a novel approach to knowledge-based automated one-shot multi-issue bilateral negotiation handling, in a homogeneous setting, both numerical features and non-numerical ones. The framework makes possible to formally represent typical situations in real e-marketplaces such as "if I spend more than 20000 e for a sedan then I want a navigator pack included" where both numerical (price) and non-numerical (sedan, navigator pack) issues coexist. To this aim we introduce P(N), a propositional logic extended with concrete domains, which allows to: model relations among issues (both numerical and not numerical ones) via logical entailment, differently from well-known approaches that describe issues as uncorrelated; represent buyer's request, seller's supply and their respective preferences as formulas endowed with a formal semantics. By modeling preferences as formulas it is hence possible to assign a utility value also to a bundle of issues, which is obviously more realistic than the trivial sum of utilities assigned to single elements in the bundle itself. We illustrate the theoretical framework, the logical language, the one-shot negotiation protocol we adopt, and show we are able to compute Pareto-efficient outcomes, using a mediator to solve a multi objective optimization problem.

AutoSLAM – A policy‐based framework for automated SLA establishment in cloud environments

“…The negotiation strategies are expressed in a declarative rules language – defeasible logic. In , the authors use propositional logic to model preferences over attributes as well as the relations among the attributes. In this work, the authors restrict themselves to Rubenstein's alternating‐offers protocol and use a mediator to solve the multi‐objective optimization problem.…”

“…In , the authors extend their work by using Description Logic, which offers greater expressivity than propositional logic. However, in both and , the authors only focus on preference specification and restrict themselves to the alternating‐offers protocol. While context‐dependent utility and the impact of context on decision‐making behavior have been investigated in the fields of human judgment and decision‐making , not much work has been carried out on studying the impact of context on SLA establishment.…”

“…In , the authors have proposed the declarative specification of decision‐making strategies using an extension of the WS‐Policy specification language where the decision‐making strategies are defined as parametric functions where the parameter values are specified via the strategy policy. Some work has also been carried out on using logic formalism to model automated negotiation and . In , the authors use a formal and executable approach to capture the behavior of the parties involved in the negotiation.…”

Increasing Bid Expressiveness for Effective and Balanced E-Barter Trading

“…The use of a logical language enhances the bid expressiveness and it allows one to catch semantic relations between attributes, through basic inference services such as subsumptions and satisfiability. Ragone et al [23] modeled a negotiation process among agents in an open e-marketplace and semantic relations among attributes are taken into account, using a propositional logic to model preferences. Here we use much more expressive DLs and introduce an approach to deal with quantities and to balance the (closed) barter market.…”

An Agent-Based Multi-issue Negotiation Model

“…In some relevant research, an evolutionary approach [1,2] is applied to find the best scheme in the utility space. In addition, some scholars have proposed a multi-objective negotiation model [3] by converting the multi-issue problem into multi-objective problem; some have proposed multi-stage negotiation model by dividing the multi-issue into one issue each time [4,5]; others use parallel negotiations to resolve multi-issue negotiation problem [6]. Moreover, in the paper [7], an alternative approach based on a weighted approximation technique to simplify the utility space for the multi-issue negotiation is provided, which is suitable for the issue related.…”