[agents] [PRIANAC] Pacific Rim International Automated Negotiation Agents Competition (Oct. 29, 2018)

[Katsuhide Fujita]

PRIANAC(Pacific Rim International Automated Negotiation Agents Competition)

http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/PRIANAC2018/index.html

We hold a competition of automated negotiation agents as a workshop in PRIMA (Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems). Automated negotiation is one of the most important AI technologies which promote collaboration and orchestration among AI-enabled social entities. To populate the technology, automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC) has been held since 2010 in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) or the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). With ANAC committee, we hold the first satellite competition in PRIMA. We welcome your submission of AI agents as well as your participation and discussion in the workshop.


## Introduction
Today’s remarkable AI trends may accelerate the necessity of collaboration among AIs and game theoretic AI technologies. Among other thing, negotiation is quite practical and suitable to apply to today’s real IT systems. That is because the protocols used in negotiation is quite similar to a real business transaction, which consists of request for proposal, proposal, counter proposal, and so on.

On the other hand, the most invested, advanced, and advertised match-type AI is no more than game; Go, Quiz, and Video Game. Even though researches on these games have been accelerating fundamental AI researches, straightforward implementations in real business seemed to be hard. Our approach to this problem is to set up a business oriented competition first, which can be easily transported into real business, then gather AI researchers to develop an eco-system. 

Therefore, in addition to hold a competition of standard automated negotiation (bilateral negotiation with alternative proposals), we will introduce two demonstrations of the setup of more business-like setting of competitions (leagues) that will be part of ANAC 2019 and hold an exhibition of the game setting in PRIANAC. One is chained-negotiation for supply chain management in the context of Industrie 4.0. The other is negotiation with an uncertain utility function to capture the preference of human.


## Program
4 hours (1:00 PM - 5:00 PM)
- Invited Talk (1 hour)
- ANAC overview (from ANAC committee) (10 minutes)
  - Motivation
  - Research Challenges
  - General Rules and History
- Industrial usage (from NEC) (15 minutes)
- Competition Setup, Results and Commentary (1 hour and 15 minutes)
  - Result and commentary (from NEC-AIST)
  - Presentation of Agents (finalists)
- Introduction and Exhibition of ANAC 2019 leagues (10th ANAC) (1 hour)
  - SCM league 
    - Concept and vision (from NEC)
    - Demonstration (from NEC-AIST)
  - Uncertainty challenge
- Discussion (20 minutes)


## Competition Overview
### Rules and Competition Settings
Challenge: agents can make use of bids in previous negotiation sessions. Therefore, we explicitly permit the use of local file and a popular machine learning library (scikit-learn).

- Platform: [Genius](http://ii.tudelft.nl/genius/)
- The number of agents: 2
- Negotiation time: 10 sec.
- The number of negotiations on the same configuration: 100

### Important dates
- Submission deadline: Sep. 30, 2018
- Competition dates: Oct. 29, 2018

### Host event
- [PRIMA 2018](http://2018.prima-conference.org/)

### Time and Location
- Date: Oct. 29, 2018
- Time: 10AM-12PM, 1PM-3PM
- Location: [AIST Tokyo Waterfront] (https://www.aist.go.jp/aist_e/guidemap/waterfront/watefront_map.html) (Tokyo, Japan)


## Submission and Copyright
### Submission
[Submission form](https://tinyurl.com/PRIANAC2018)
A submission includes the following files:
- Source code 
- Class Files
- At least 1 page and maximum of 4 page description and explanation of their agent. Particularly, the participants should explain concisely:
  - Bidding Strategy 
  - Opponent Modeling
  - Acceptance Strategy 
  - Learning strategy 

### Copyright agreement
By entering the competition, the participants agree on granting copyright to our organisation committee to make source code and explanations of the agents available on the website of the competition and repository of agents with the open source GENIUS, while retaining copyright yourselves as well.


## Participation in PRIMA workshop
The registration of workshop is necessary from the PRIMA registration site.

It is expected that teams that make it through to the finals will have a representative attending PRIANAC session. Teams in the final will be given the opportunity to give a brief presentation describing their agent at the session. It is an option to present through Skype or a video message without attending PRIANAC (no registration fee). Those who would like to make a presentation and are not a finalist, please contact us.


## Organizing Committee
### Organizing Chair
- Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology
### Organizers
- Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology
- Reyhan Aydogan, Ozyegin University & Delft University of Technology
- Tim Baarslag, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
- Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
- Satoshi Morinaga, NEC Corporation / AIST
- Shinji Nakadai, NEC Corporation / AIST
- Takashi Yoshida, NEC Corporation / AIST
- Yasser Mohammad, AIST
### Student Committee
- Tatsuya Toyama, Nagoya Institute of Technology
- Tomoya Fukui, Nagoya Institute of Technology
- Ryohei Kawata, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

AIST: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology


## Contact
prianac2018-groups at go.tuat.ac.jp