Fuzzy Constraint-Based Agent Negotiation

Conflicts between two or more parties arise forvarious reasons and perspectives. Thus, resolution of conflicts frequentlyrelies on some form of negotiation. This paper presents a generalproblem-solving framework for modeling multi-issue multilateral negotiationusing fuzzy constraints. Agent negotiation isformulated as a distributed fuzzy constraint satisfaction problem (DFCSP).Fuzzy constrains are thus used to naturally represent each agent's desiresinvolving imprecision and human conceptualization, particularly when lexicalimprecision and subjective matters are concerned. On the other hand, based onfuzzy constraint-based problem-solving, our approach enables an agent not onlyto systematically relax fuzzy constraints to generate a proposal, but also toemploy fuzzy similarity to select the alternative that is subject to itsacceptability by the opponents. This task of problem-solving is to reach anagreement that benefits all agents with a high satisfaction degree of fuzzyconstraints, and move towards the deal more quickly since their search focusesonly on the feasible solution space. An application to multilateralnegotiation of a travel planning is provided to demonstrate the usefulness andeffectiveness of our framework.