May 15, 7:00 PM
OEC Auditorium
(O'Shaughnessy Education Center)
A Framework for Contracting in a Multi-Agent Environment
Topic Summary
Business-to-business e-commerce is expanding rapidly, letting companies both broaden their customer base and increase their pool of potential suppliers. Negotiating supplier contracts for the multiple components that often make up a single product is complicated because time dependencies introduce a significant scheduling risk. Current e-commerce systems typically rely on either fixed-price catalogues or auctions. Such systems focus only on cost, which is just one factor in the complicated buyer-supplier relationship.
The major difficulties in automating negotiation come from the need to measure risk, to model risk aversion, to handle deadlines, and to deal with failure in contract execution. We present the University of Minnesota MAGNET (Multi-Agent Negotiation testbed) system. MAGNET is designed to support the negotiation of contracts for coordinated tasks among a population of independent and autonomous agents. We report on methods for determining the form and content of Requests for Quotations, on the management of the bidding process, and on the process of evaluating bids submitted by potential suppliers.
More information on MAGNET can be found on the Web at http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/airvl/magnet and in the article by John Collins, Corey Bilot, Maria Gini, and Bamshad Mobasher, "Decision Processes in Agent-Based Automated Contracting," Which appeared in IEEE Internet Computing, March 2001.
Speaker Information
Maria Gini is professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where she has been a faculty member since 1982. Before joining the University of Minnesota, she has been a Research Associate at the Politecnico of Milano, Italy, and a Visiting Research Associate in the AI Lab at Stanford University.
Her research work is in using Artificial Intelligence to build autonomous entities, such as robots and intelligent software agents. She has co-authored over 100 technical papers. She is on the editorial board of the journals "Autonomous Robots" and "Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering", and she is the General Chair for the International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems in 2002, and for the International Conference on Autonomous Agents in 2002.