[agents] Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2012) - Second and Updated Call for Participation

[Colin Williams]

(Please see the section 'Changes with respect to ANAC 2011' for the updated part of this call for participation.)



The 3rd International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2012)

In conjunction with AAMAS 2012.

June 4-8, 2012, Valencia, Spain

http://anac2012.ecs.soton.ac.uk

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

After the successes of the previous two years, we would like to invite you to participate in the third Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC). This competition brings together researchers from the negotiation community and provides a unique benchmark for evaluating practical negotiation strategies in multi-issue domains. In particular, the goals include of the competition include: (i) to encourage the design of practical negotiation agents that can proficiently negotiate against unknown opponents and in a variety of circumstances, (ii) to provide a benchmark for objectively evaluating different negotiation strategies, (iii) to explore different learning and adaptation strategies and opponent models, and (iv) to collect state-of-the-art negotiating agents and negotiation scenarios, and making them available to the wider research community.

ENTRANTS

The aim for the entrants to the competition is to develop an autonomous negotiation agent as well as submit a negotiation scenario. Performance of the agents will then be evaluated in a tournament setting, where each agent is matched with all other submitted agents, and each pair of agents will negotiate in each submitted negotiation scenario. Negotiations are repeated several times to obtain statistically significant results. The winning agent will be the one with the highest overall score.

A negotiation scenario consists of a specification of the objectives and issues to be resolved by means of negotiation. This includes the preferences of both negotiating parties about the possible agreements. The preferences of a party are modelled using linearly additive, multi-issue utility functions.

RULES OF ENCOUNTER

Negotiations are bilateral and based on the alternating-offers protocol. Offers are exchanged in real time with a deadline after 3 minutes. This means that the number of offers exchanged within a certain time period varies and depends on the computation required by the agents. If no agreement is reached by the deadline, or if either agent chooses to terminate the negotiation before the deadline, both agents receive their utility of conflict. In addition, there will be a discount factor in about half of the domains, where the value of an agreement decreases over time.

The challenge for an agent is to negotiate without any knowledge of the opponent's preferences and strategy. Although each agent participates in many negotiation sessions, against different opponents, and in a wide variety of negotiation scenarios, agents cannot learn between negotiations. This means that negotiation agents only have the opportunity to adapt and learn from the offers they receive within a single negotiation session.

CHANGES WITH RESPECT TO ANAC 2011

This year's competition introduces, for the first time, a private reservation value as part of the tournament. The reservation value of an agent is the utility of conflict, and is achieved if either the agent fails to reach an agreement by the deadline, or if one of the agents terminates the negotiation. The reservation values can be different for each agent and for each negotiation scenario. An agent only knows its own reservation value, and not that of its opponent. The reservation value is discounted in the same way that an agreement would be. This makes it rational, in certain circumstances, for an agent to terminate an agreement early, in order to take the reservation value with a smaller loss due to discounting.

GENIUS

The negotiation tournament is run using the java-based GENIUS negotiation platform, which has been developed to facilitate research in the area of bilateral multi-issue negotiation. It has an open architecture that allows for easy development and integration of existing negotiating agents using design patterns. GENIUS can be used to simulate individual negotiation sessions as well as tournaments between negotiating agents in various negotiation scenarios. The core functionality of the system includes: (1)specification of negotiation domains and preference profiles; (2) simulation of a bilateral negotiation between agents; and (3) analysis of the negotiation outcomes and negotiation dynamics. It furthermore allows the specification of negotiation domains and preference profiles by means of a graphical user interface.

This year's competition will use version 3.2 of the GENIUS platform. The platform, together with the agents and scenarios from the previous competitions are available at:

http://mmi.tudelft.nl/genius

To learn more about the 2012 negotiation tournament see:

http://anac2012.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

QUALIFYING ROUND AND FINALS

There will be an initial qualifying rounds, and the top 8 performing agents will continue to the finals, which will be held at the AAMAS conference.

It is expected that teams that make it through to the finals will have a representative attending the AAMAS 2011 conference. Each team in the final will have the opportunity to give a brief presentation describing their agent.

PRIZES

There is a generous total reward of US$1500 which will be divided between the top performing entrants. More details about the prizes will be announced on the ANAC 2012 website:

http://anac2012.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

IMPORTANT DATES

* 18 March, 2012. The deadline for submitting agents and domains for the qualifying round.
* 15 April 2012.  Announcement of the 8 finalists.
* June 4-8, 2012.  Final competition and presentations at the International Workshop on Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiations (ACAN 2012). ACAN 2012 will have a special session for presentations for ANAC teams.

CONTACT

For any questions, the main contact is:

Colin R. Williams    crw104 at ecs.soton.ac.uk

LOCAL ORGANISERS

* Colin R. Williams, University of Southampton
* Valentin Robu, University of Southampton
* Enrico Gerding, University of Southampton
* Nicolas R. Jennings, University of Southampton

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

* Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology
* Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology
* Sarit Kraus, University of Maryland and Bar-Ilan University
* Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology
* Raz Lin, Bar-Ilan University
* Tim Baarslag, Delft University of Technology

SPONSORS

Makoto Lab., Inc.


--
Colin Williams
crw104 at ecs.soton.ac.uk

Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group
Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, UK