Automated Negotiations Protocols for Complex Utility Function as Social System

This chapter focuses on automated negotiations based on multi-agent systems. It targets researchers and students in various communities of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, such as agreement technology, cyber-physical system (CPS), electronic commerce, and so on. It helps readers understand automated negotiations, negotiation protocols, negotiating agents’ strategies, and their applications. Negotiation is an essential aspect of daily life and represents an important topic in multi-agent system research. This chapter focuses on multiple interdependent issues negotiation, which is a more realistic situation than simple negotiations involving only multiple independent issues. The key impact of such issue dependencies is that their results in agent utility functions are complex. Existing negotiation protocols which are well-suited for linear utility functions are, however, often not able to find well agreements when applied to complex negotiations with issue dependencies. This chapter shows some negotiation protocols focusing on the multiple interdependent issues negotiations to find high-quality solutions for the complex agents’ utility function.