On Effective Quality of Service Negotiation

This paper addresses the problem of flexible procuring of multiple services with multiple non-functional characteristics, i.e., quality of service attributes. We investigate the one-to-many negotiation approach as a flexible method for procuring multiple services by a buyer agent. We address the problem of coordinating multiple concurrent negotiations and propose a novel dynamic negotiation strategy that considers the behaviors of the opponents in managing the local reservation values for the common negotiation issues. Most previous works consider the problem of negotiation over a single issue. We investigate a more complex scenario where a buyer agent negotiates with multiple seller agents over multiple services characterized by multiple issues. The initial experimental results show the effectiveness of our dynamic negotiation strategy when compared to a static strategy.