Negotiation Networks

谈判网络

• 批准号: 0829580
• 负责人: Jose Vidal
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University South Carolina Research Foundation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-01 至 2011-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0829580&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Negotiation; Networks

This research involves the development of automated negotiation protocols for autonomous agents in negotiation networks, where each agent can only negotiate with few selected neighbors. That is, we develop agents that can carry out any number of simultaneous negotiations with other selfish agents. For example, they could be routers in the Internet negotiating over which packets to route and which to drop, or purchasing agents in a supply chain deciding what to buy and at what price, or web services deciding who to provide services for and at what price, or sensors in a sensor network deciding which measurements to make and who to forward the results. Our research involves building the negotiation strategies for selfish rational agents that individuals and companies will want to use, along with the negotiation protocols that ensure the agents'interactions result in efficient global resource allocations.The problem of negotiation networks combines features of characteristic form games and bargaining games from game theory, combinatorial auctions and distributed mechanism design from Economics, network exchange theory from Sociology, and distributed algorithm design from computer science. Our research brings together results from these disparate fields into one framework and provides algorithmic solutions for the dynamic, distributed problem of resource allocation among self-interested parties, in contrast with game theory and Economics' solutions which are typically steady-state axiomatic solutions. Success in this research is potentially transformative as it will provide the foundation for the engineering of protocols and efficient algorithms for distributed resource allocation, which is a pervasive problem in our ever-growing highly-interconnected society.

这项研究涉及协商网络中自主代理的自动协商协议的开发，其中每个代理只能与少数选定的邻居进行协商。也就是说，我们开发的代理可以与其他自私代理同时进行任意数量的谈判。例如，它们可以是互联网中的路由器，协商路由哪些数据包以及丢弃哪些数据包，或者是供应链中决定购买什么和以什么价格购买的采购代理，或者是决定向谁提供服务以及以什么价格提供服务的网络服务，或传感器网络中的传感器决定进行哪些测量以及由谁转发结果。我们的研究涉及为个人和公司想要使用的自私理性代理建立谈判策略，以及确保代理的交互导致有效的全球资源分配的谈判协议。谈判网络问题结合了特征形式博弈的特征和博弈论中的讨价还价博弈、经济学中的组合拍卖和分布式机制设计、社会学中的网络交换理论、计算机科学中的分布式算法设计。我们的研究将这些不同领域的成果汇集到一个框架中，并为利己方之间资源分配的动态、分布式问题提供算法解决方案，这与博弈论和经济学的解决方案（通常是稳态公理化解决方案）形成鲜明对比。这项研究的成功具有潜在的变革性，因为它将为分布式资源分配的协议工程和高效算法提供基础，这是我们不断发展的高度互联社会中的一个普遍问题。