[agents] ANAC2011 Call for Participation

[Takayuki Ito]

The 2nd International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2011)    
May 2-6, 2011, Taipei, Taiwan

Call For Participants 
We would like to invite you to participate in the Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC). The purpose of the competition is to steer the research in the area bilateral multi-issue closed negotiation. Closed negotiation, when opponents do not reveal their preferences to each other, is an important class of real-life negotiations. Negotiating agents designed using heuristic approach need extensive evaluation, typically through simulations and empirical analysis, since it is usually impossible to predict precisely how the system and the constituent agents will behave in a wide variety of circumstances. Furthermore, there is a need for the development of a best practice repository for negotiation techniques. That is, a coherent resource that describes which negotiation techniques are best suited to a given type of problem or domain. 

To facilitate research in the area of bilateral multi-issue negotiation the GENIUS system is developed. GENIUS allows easy development and integration of existing negotiating agents. GENIUS can be used to simulate individual negotiation sessions as well as tournaments between negotiating agents in various negotiation scenarios. It implements an open architecture that allows easy development and integration of existing negotiating agents using design patterns. The core functionality of the system includes: (1)specification of negotiation domains and preference profiles; (2) simulation of a bilateral negotiation between agents (3) analysis of the negotiation outcomes and negotiation dynamics. An analytical toolbox integrated in GENIUS calculates optimal solutions, such as the Pareto efficient frontier, Nash product and others. It allows the specification of negotiation domains and preference profiles by means of a graphical user interface.

Performance of agents will be evaluated in a tournament that is defined by a set of agents, negotiation domains and preference profiles. For a tournament a set of negotiation sessions will be generated by matching all agents with all other agents on all domains using all profiles submitted by participants for the competition. A negotiation domain is a specification of the objectives and issues to be resolved by means of negotiation. An objective may branch into sub-objectives and issues providing a tree-like structure to the domain. Preferences profiles are defined for a specific negotiation domain and represent preferences of a single negotiating party in the domain regarding possible agreements. The preferences of a party are modeled using utility functions.

The ANAC competition will be held in spring 2011, with the finals being run during the AAMAS 2011 conference. The reward for the winner of the competition is US$1000.

ORGANIZATION 
* Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito (Organizing chair)
* Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker
* Prof. Dr. Sarit Kraus
* Prof. Dr. Minjie Zhang
* Dr. Koen Hindriks 
* Dr. Raz Lin 
* Tim Baarslag

TIMELINE 
* Design and test your agent in GENIUS yourself. 
* Jan. 31st, 2011. The deadline for submitting agents and domains for Qualifying round. 
  Those who submit ONE domain has the right to submit ONE agent. 
* Feb. 28th, 2011.  Announcement of 8 finalists. 
* March 31st, 2011. The deadline for submitting final agents and domains for final round. 
* May 2-6, 2011.  Final competition in AAMAS and presentations in ACAN.

AAMAS Workshop ACAN2011 will have a special session for presentations for ANAC teams.

It is expected that teams that make it through to the finals will attend the AAMAS 2011 conference. 

To learn more about ANAC and GENIUS see: 
http://www.anac2011.com/
http://mmi.tudelft.nl/negotiation/index.php/Genius