Abstract-In the literature on automated negotiation, very few negotiation agents are designed with the flexibility to slightly relax their negotiation criteria to reach a consensus more rapidly and with more certainty. Furthermore, these relaxed-criteria negotiation agents were not equipped with the ability to enhance their performance by learning and evolving their relaxedcriteria negotiation rules. The impetus of this work is designing market-driven negotiation agents (MDAs) that not only have the flexibility of relaxing bargaining criteria using fuzzy rules, but can also evolve their structures by learning new relaxed-criteria fuzzy rules to improve their negotiation outcomes as they participate in negotiations in more e-markets. To this end, an evolutionary algorithm for adapting and evolving relaxed-criteria fuzzy rules was developed. Implementing the idea in a testbed, two kinds of experiments for evaluating and comparing EvEMDAs (MDAs with relaxed-criteria rules that are evolved using the evolutionary algorithm) and EMDAs (MDAs with relaxed-criteria rules that are manually constructed) were carried out through stochastic simulations. Empirical results show that: 1) EvEMDAs generally outperformed EMDAs in different types of e-markets and 2) the negotiation outcomes of EvEMDAs generally improved as they negotiated in more e-markets. Index Terms-Adaptive agent, automated negotiation, evolutionary algorithm, evolutionary computational economics, fuzzy decision controller (FDC), intelligent agent, negotiation agent.
Thus, the negotiator agents of REF are more adaptive.
Evolving Fuzzy Rules for Relaxed-Criteria Negotiation
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics)
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics)
Computer Science Medicine