Concern-based Segmentation for Agents Societies to Facilitate Negotiation over Service Exchange

Different communities of software agents may address different predefined concerns, some of these concerns may also be the result of combining two or more sub-concerns. In our research, we look at a concern as the abstract concept a community of agents is continually supporting as long as certain objectives are being accomplished. Besides, a sub-concern is a generically narrower concept of a community’s abstract concern, which is satisfied whenever a specific set of objectives is being achieved. In this paper, we introduce a formal description of the setting wherein we expect software agents to negotiate over service exchange, (i.e., acquisition and provision). We also formalize the negotiation issue that any two interacting agents in the context of our research are expected to resolve while characterizing the negotiation parties Agents. The purpose of the formalization we introduce is to facilitate the achievement of goals that service-driven software agents are interacting to reach.