Abstract
We propose to handle the complexity of utility spaces used in multi-issue negotiation by adopting a new representation that allows a modular decomposition of the issues and the constraints. This is based on the idea that a constraint-based utility space is nonlinear with respect to issues, but linear with respect to the constraints. This allows us to rigorously map the utility space into an issue-constraint hyper-graph. Exploring the utility space reduces then to a message passing mechanism along the hyper-edges of the hyper-graph by means of utility propagation. Optimal contracts are found efficiently using a variation of the Max-Sum algorithm. We evaluate the model experimentally using parameterized nonlinear utility spaces, showing that it can handle a large family of complex utility spaces by finding optimal contracts, outperforming previous sampling-based approaches. We also evaluate the model in a negotiation setting. We show that under high complexity, social welfare could be greater than the sum of the individual agents' best utilities.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 514-521 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics |
Volume | 19 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 20 Jul 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Hyper-graph
- Max-sum
- Multi-agent systems
- Multi-issue negotiation
- Nonlinear utility spaces