Automated Negotiation from Declarative Contract Descriptions

Abstract

Our approach for automating the negotiation of business contracts proceeds in three broad steps. First, determine the structure of the negotiation process by applying general knowledge about auctions and domain-specific knowledge about the contract subject along with preferences from po- tential buyers and sellers. Second, translate the determined negotiation structure into an operational specication for an auction platform. Third, map the negotiation results to a nal contract. We have implemented a prototype which supports these steps, employing a declarative specication (in Courteous Logic Programs) of (1) high-level knowledge about alternative negotiation structures, (2) general-case rules about auction parameters, (3) rules to map the auction parameters to a specic auction platform, and (4) special- case rules for subject domains. We demonstrate the exi- bility of this approach by automatically generating several alternative negotiation structures for a previous domain: travel-shopping in a trading agent competitio