Building an Automated win-win Negotiation Process Model

This paper builds an automated negotiation process model for integrative negotiations. The process model defines and automates the necessary phases and activities along with the integrative negotiation approach principles to create win-win outcomes that mutually satisfy negotiating parties. However, to realize this objective, the negotiation literature and theories are reviewed to determine the relevant theories for integrative negotiations that help to develop and form the basis of the process model. After investigation, it became evident that three main theories, which are Decision Theory, Rational Choice Theory and Mutual Gains Theory, contribute to building the integrative process model by setting its phases and components. The model is composed of five main phases with several sub-phases. Decision theory with mutual gains theory provides the robust process model through several phases, and rational choice theory with mutual gains theory ensures they are implemented in a fair, objective manner to come up with a satisfying win-win solution. Hence, automated negotiation processes when designed in a robust manner that is based on the theory that serves integrative approaches could lead to win-win negotiation outcomes. The foundation of the win-win negotiation process model contributes to designing win-win negotiation outcomes through structuring automated negotiation and setting its phases along with the integrative negotiation principles. It develops the negotiation field by integrating automation and the integrative approach principles in a process model.

Can Social Agents Efficiently Perform in Automated Negotiation?

In the last few years, we witnessed a growing body of literature about automated negotiation. Mainly, negotiating agents are either purely self-driven by maximizing their utility function or by assuming a cooperative stance by all parties involved in the negotiation. We argue that, while optimizing one’s utility function is essential, agents in a society should not ignore the opponent’s utility in the final agreement to improve the agent’s long-term perspectives in the system. This article aims to show whether it is possible to design a social agent (i.e., one that aims to optimize both sides’ utility functions) while performing efficiently in an agent society. Accordingly, we propose a social agent supported by a portfolio of strategies, a novel tit-for-tat concession mechanism, and a frequency-based opponent modeling mechanism capable of adapting its behavior according to the opponent’s behavior and the state of the negotiation. The results show that the proposed social agent not only maximizes social metrics such as the distance to the Nash bargaining point or the Kalai point but also is shown to be a pure and mixed equilibrium strategy in some realistic agent societies.

ANEGMA: an automated negotiation model for e-markets

We present a novel negotiation model that allows an agent to learn how to negotiate during concurrent bilateral negotiations in unknown and dynamic e-markets. The agent uses an actor-critic architecture with model-free reinforcement learning to learn a strategy expressed as a deep neural network. We pre-train the strategy by supervision from synthetic market data, thereby decreasing the exploration time required for learning during negotiation. As a result, we can build automated agents for concurrent negotiations that can adapt to different e-market settings without the need to be pre-programmed. Our experimental evaluation shows that our deep reinforcement learning based agents outperform two existing well-known negotiation strategies in one-to-many concurrent bilateral negotiations for a range of e-market settings.

Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Conflict Resolution

Conflict resolution is essential to obtain cooperation in many scenarios such as politics and business, as well as our day to day life. The importance of conflict resolution has driven research in many fields like anthropology, social science, psychology, mathematics, biology and, more recently, in artificial intelligence. Computer science and artificial intelligence have, in turn, been inspired by theories and techniques from these disciplines, which has led to a variety of computational models and approaches, such as automated negotiation, group decision making, argumentation, preference aggregation, and human-machine interaction. To bring together the different research strands and disciplines in conflict resolution, the Workshop on Conflict Resolution in Decision Making (COREDEMA) was organized. This special issue benefited from the workshop series, and consists of significantly extended and revised selected papers from the ECAI 2016 COREDEMA workshop, as well as completely new contributions.

A New Convolutional Neural Network based on a Saprse Convolutional Layer for Animal Face Detection

This paper focuses on the face detection problem of three popular animal cat-egories that need control such as horses, cats and dogs. To be precise, a new Convolutional Neural Network for Animal Face Detection (CNNAFD) is actu-ally investigated using processed filters based on gradient features and applied with a new way. A new convolutional layer is proposed through a sparse feature selection method known as Automated Negotiation-based Online Feature Selection (ANOFS). CNNAFD ends by stacked fully connected layers which represent a strong classifier. The fusion of CNNAFD and MobileNetV2 constructs the newnetwork CNNAFD-MobileNetV2 which improves the classification results and gives better detection decisions. Our work also introduces a new Tunisian Horse Detection Database (THDD). The proposed detector with the new CNNAFD-MobileNetV2 network achieved an average precision equal to 99.78%, 99% and 98.28% for cats, dogs and horses respectively.

A New Convolutional Neural Network based on a Saprse Convolutional Layer for Animal Face Detection

This paper focuses on the face detection problem of three popular animal cat-egories that need control such as horses, cats and dogs. To be precise, a new Convolutional Neural Network for Animal Face Detection (CNNAFD) is actu-ally investigated using processed filters based on gradient features and applied with a new way. A new convolutional layer is proposed through a sparse feature selection method known as Automated Negotiation-based Online Feature Selection (ANOFS). CNNAFD ends by stacked fully connected layers which represent a strong classifier. The fusion of CNNAFD and MobileNetV2 constructs the newnetwork CNNAFD-MobileNetV2 which improves the classification results and gives better detection decisions. Our work also introduces a new Tunisian Horse Detection Database (THDD). The proposed detector with the new CNNAFD-MobileNetV2 network achieved an average precision equal to 99.78%, 99% and 98.28% for cats, dogs and horses respectively.