Agreement technologies

Summary form only given. Computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements are fast becoming commonplace in a wide range of networked systems (e.g., in the semantic Web, grid computing, pervasive computing and peer-to-peer systems). In such systems, agents are required to participate in a range of negotiation scenarios and exhibit a range of negotiation behaviours (depending on the context). To this end, this article explores the issues involved in designing and implementing the mechanisms and the strategies by which such agreements can be attained.