[agents] Call for Participation - ANAC 2016 Deadline 30 March, 2016

[Reyhan Aydogan]

***** Call for Participation - ANAC 2016 *****

We would like to invite you to participate in the Seventh Automated
Negotiating Agents Competition, ANAC 2016. The deadline for submission is
30 March, 2016.

Web site: http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2016/


*** ANAC 2016 ****

The Seventh International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC
2016).

To be held in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2016), Singapore, 9th-13th
May 2016.


*** Overview of ANAC 2016 ***

The ANAC competition brings together researchers from the negotiation
community and provides a unique benchmark for evaluating practical
negotiation strategies in multi-issue domains. The previous competitions
have spawned novel research in AI in the field of autonomous agent design
which are available to the wider research community. The focus of this
year's competition is on multi-party negotiation in smart energy grids.

The goals of the competition are:

   -

   to encourage the design of practical negotiation agents that can
   proficiently negotiate against unknown opponents and in a variety of
   circumstances,
   -

   to provide a benchmark for objectively evaluating different negotiation
   strategies, and protocols
   -

   to explore different learning and adaptation strategies for opponent
   modeling, bidding and accepting offers, and
   -

   to collect state-of-the-art negotiating agents and protocols, and to
   collect benchmark negotiation scenarios, and making these available to the
   wider research community.


The following information is an abstract of the rules of the competition.
Full information can be found on the ANAC 2016 website:
http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2016/

*** Entrants ***

Entrants to the competition have to develop and submit an autonomous
negotiation agent that runs on Genius. Genius is a Java-based negotiation
platform in which you can create negotiation domains and preference
profiles as well as develop negotiating agents. The platform allows you to
simulate negotiation sessions and run tournaments. More details can be
found by following this link:

   -

   http://ii.tudelft.nl/genius/


Performance of the agents will be evaluated in a tournament setting, where
each agent is matched with other submitted agents, and each set of agents
will negotiate in a number of negotiation scenarios. One of the scenarios
will be a smart energy grids scenario. Negotiations are repeated several
times to obtain statistically significant results.

A negotiation scenario consists of a specification of negotiation issues
and preferences of all negotiating parties. The preferences of a party are
modelled using additive utility functions.


*** Rules of Encounter ***

Negotiations are multilateral and based on a multi-player version of the
alternating-offers protocol. Offers are exchanged in real time with a
deadline after 3 minutes. 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 preferences and strategies of the opponents.

Agents can be disqualified for violating the spirit of fair play. The
competition rules allow multiple entries from a single institution, but
require each agent to be developed independently.


*** Main updates with respect to ANAC 2015 ***

This year, we introduce a negotiation theme: “negotiation in smart energy
grids”. Each participant is expected to submit a negotiation scenario
particularly on “smart energy grids”. That is, each group will submit
a negotiation
domain description for smart energy grids, and three conflicting preference
profiles represented by means of linear additive utility.

For instance, a scenario involving consumers, prosumers and energy
providers who negotiate on energy amount and unit cost. Another scenario
could involve smart devices that negotiate power consumption scheduling.
The participants are very welcome to generate any kind of scenario
regarding this domain. Scenarios will be additive as in previous years and
can be constructed using the Genius interface or, if preferred, by editing
the corresponding XML files. A typical example from ANAC 2012 is the Energy
domain submitted by the University of Southampton (
http://anac2012.ecs.soton.ac.uk/domains/2012/49), which can be found in the
Genisu repository. Since these profiles will be used in the competition, we
recommend the participants to submit challenging negotiation scenarios on
smart energy grids.

The challenge is to reach an agreement while negotiating with two opponents
at the same time as it was last year. This year, there will be a qualification
round where each negotiation party will negotiate against the top 3 agents
of ANAC 2015, namely:

   -

   Atlas Agent
   -

   Pars Agent
   -

   Random Dance Agent


The top 10 performing agents of the qualification round will continue to
the finals and compete with all other finalists.  That is we will run a
tournament including all finalists on the submitted negotiation scenarios.

The multi-player protocol is a simple extension of the bilateral
alternating offers protocol, called the Stacked Alternating Offers Protocol
(SAOP). According to this protocol,  all of the participants around the
table get a turn per round; turns are taken clock-wise around the table.
The first party starts the negotiation with an offer that is observed by
all others immediately. Whenever an offer is made the next party in line
can take the following actions:

1. Make a counter offer (thus rejecting and overriding the previous offer)

2. Accept the offer

3. Walk away (e.g. ending the negotiation without any agreement)

This process is repeated in a turn taking clock-wise fashion until reaching
an agreement or reaching the deadline. To reach an agreement, all parties
should accept the offer. If at the deadline no agreement has been reached,
the negotiation fails.


*** Qualifying Round and Finals ***

Each negotiation party will negotiate against the winners of ANAC 2015:
Atlas, Pars and Random Dance Agent. The teams of the top 10 performing
agents will be notified, and the final results will be announced at the
AAMAS conference.

It is expected that teams that make it through to the finals will have a
representative attending the AAMAS 2015 conference. Each team in the final
will have the opportunity to give a brief presentation describing their
agent.

****Registration Form for ANAC 2016 Intention****

We would like to know who are willing to participate in the competition. By
registering your information, we can inform about Genius update and ANAC
2016 information and so on. Letting us about your intention to participate
in ANAC 2016 is important for us so that we can inform you about any update.

Please register your information from the following URL:
http://goo.gl/forms/ziy0KksaZh

Submission package: The participants will submit their agent source code
and class files (in a .zip or .jar package) as well as their negotiation
scenario (i.e., domain.xml, profile1.xml, profile2.xml, and profile 3.xml).
Please send your submission package by 30 March, 2016 -
reyhan.aydogan at ozyegin.edu.tr and katfuji at cc.tuat.ac.jp

*** Important Dates: ***

Deadline for submission: 30 March, 2016

Announcement of the finalists: 10 April, 2016

*** Venue ***

The conference will be held at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel
Singapore
<http://www.millenniumhotels.com.sg/grandcopthornewaterfront/hotel-location.html>
.

*** Organising Committee ***

Dr. Reyhan Aydogan, Ozyegin University & Delft University of Technology

Dr. Tim Baarslag, University of Southampton

Prof. Dr. Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

Dr. Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology

Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology

Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology


*** Prizes ***

The prize money will be at least 1000 dollars. The prize will be shared
among the top agents  - winners in terms of individual utility.

*** Sponsors ***

Makoto lab. Inc.

TU Delft

*** Contact ***

For any questions, the main contact is reyhan.aydogan at ozyegin.edu.tr