2020 Volume E103.D Issue 4 Pages 759-770
This paper presents a compromising strategy based on constraint relaxation for automated negotiating agents in the nonlinear utility domain. Automated negotiating agents have been studied widely and are one of the key technologies for a future society in which multiple heterogeneous agents act collaboratively and competitively in order to help humans perform daily activities. A pressing issue is that most of the proposed negotiating agents utilize an ad-hoc compromising process, in which they basically just adjust/reduce a threshold to forcibly accept their opponents' offers. Because the threshold is just reduced and the agent just accepts the offer since the value is more than the threshold, it is very difficult to show how and what the agent conceded even after an agreement has been reached. To address this issue, we describe an explainable concession process using a constraint relaxation process. In this process, an agent changes its belief by relaxing constraints, i.e., removing constraints, so that it can accept it is the opponent's offer. We also propose three types of compromising strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that these strategies are efficient.
