Formal Analysis of Negotiation Protocols for Task Allocation

To formally understand the complex behaviors of negotiating agents so as to design appropriate mechanisms to approximate optimal performance, we have constructed a unified framework to model and analyze the task allocation problem in agent societies with different objectives. This OAR framework includes three aspects: agent's objective (O), its negotiation attitude (A) and the reward splitting (R) among agents who cooperate to accomplish tasks. An agent's objective can span the spectrum from totally self-interested to completely cooperative, and there can be a mixture of agents with varying objectives in one agent society. This work focuses on understanding how these different aspects interact in order to achieve individual agent's objective and to produce effective system performance as well. Using the OAR framework, we develop a closed form statistical analysis to mathematically analyze the interaction between attitude parameters and reward splitting and their relationship with different objective functions