Reasoning and Negotiating with Complex Preferences Using CP-Nets

Abstract

Automated negotiation is important for carrying out flexible transactions. Agents that take part in automated negotiation need to have a concise representation of their user’s preferences and should be able to reason on these preferences effectively. We develop an automated negotiation platform wherein consumer agents negotiate with producer agents about services. A consumer agent represents its user’s preferences in a compact way using a CP-net, which is a structure that allows users to order their preferences based on the different value combinations of attributes. Acquiring user’s preferences in a compact way is crucial since it significantly decreases the number of questions to be asked to the user by the consumer agent. We design strategies for consumer agents to reason on and negotiate effectively with the preference graph induced from a CP-net. These strategies are designed to generate deals that are acceptable by the provider and the consumer. We compare our proposed strategies in terms of how well and how quickly they can find desirable deals for the consumer.

Reyhan Aydoğan is the primary contact author. Phone: +90-212-359-7095, Fax: +90-212-287-2461. This research has been partially supported by Boğaziçi University Research Fund under grant BAP07A102 and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey by a CAREER Award under grant 105E073. We thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.