The talk will report on some research results in the area of agent-mediated
e-negotiation at CSIRO Applied Artificial Intelligence (AAI). In the
introduction I'll give a short overview of the research program carried
out in the AAI group with a few examples of our research projects on
Intelligent Trading Agents, RoboCup and Networked Service Management. In
the main part of the talk I'll focus on our research on Intelligent
Trading Agents. In particular I will present some aspects of Fuzzy
e-Negotiation Agents (FeNAs) for autonomous multi-issue negotiation in the
presence of limited common knowledge and imprecise/soft constraints and
preferences. FeNAs use principles of utility theory and fuzzy
constraint-based reasoning in order to find a consensus that maximizes an
agent's utility at the highest possible level of fuzzy constraint
satisfaction subject to its acceptability by other agents. The capabilities
of FeNAs for multi-issue integrative negotiation will be illustrated with
two scenarios for negotiating document translation services and used car
trading. I'll also outline the applicability of the presented approach for
multi-agent coordination and negotiation with varying level of common
knowledge shared between the agents.