Argumentation Based Negotiation in Multi-agent System

Negotiation is a process of reaching an agreement on the terms of a transaction such as price, quantity, for two or more parties in multi-agent systems such as E-Commerce. It tries to maximize the benefits for all parties. Argumentation-based negotiation has been proposed as an alternative to proposal-based approaches such as game theory and heuristic. The main advantage is that it allows agents to exchange additional information rather than just simple proposals. This property of argumentation protocols can lead to beneficial agreements when used for complex multi agent negotiation. This paper presents an empirical comparison of argumentation-based negotiation to proposal-based negotiation in a strategic two-player scenario. It is implemented through a well established FIPA-complaint Agent Toolkit, JADE. Our experiments show that the argumentation-based approach outperforms the proposal-based approach with respect to the quality of the agreements found and the quantity of unsuccessful negotiations.