Agent Communication Language for Automated Negotiation Online

Abstract

Current research in automated negotiation is lack of a unified technical standard, which is an obstacle for the system to be applied practically. The existing standard KQML (Knowledge Query Manipulation Language) has obvious flaws in its semantics definition; moreover, its function is insufficient for describing negotiation. The contribution of the work is twofold. On one hand, it expands the speech acts of KQML, and defines semantics of the new proposed speech acts. On the other hand, it designs a general interaction mechanism among negotiating agents, in which the negotiation language and ontology used by agents is defined. The work has been attempted in such a way so as to provide general support for a wide variety of commercial negotiation circumstances, and therefore to be particularly suitable for electronic commerce.