Negotiations

A negotiation is a distributed process executed by multiple agents with goal to get a solution for a problem. In multi-agents systems negotiations will happen very frequently so it makes sense to provide a common way of implementing and using them.

Building upon the negotiations roles

Unlike the coalition module, the negotiation roles are not usable on their own, because you are missing the actual negotiation logic. As a result a negotiation is abstractly implemented. The core is built with two different roles NegotiationStarterRole and NegotiationParticipant. The first is responsible for starting a negotiation using an existing coalition and a message creator, which defines the type of negotiations. The second is an extendable role for handling negotiation related messages.

What do you have to do to implement your own negotiation?

1. Create message classes for the negotiation

2. Define a function, which creates a message to start a negotiation

3. Extend NegotiationParticipant and implement handle. Here you can implement your negotiation logic = what should happen when a negotiation related message arrives?

An example for an implemented negotiation can be found in COHDA: