Abstract
This chapter presents a decentralized negotiation protocol for cooperative economic scheduling in a supply chain environment. These protocols are evaluated using software agents that maximize their profits by optimizing their local schedule and offer side payments to compensate other agents for lost profit or extra expense if cumulative profit is achievable. To further increase their income the agents have to apply a randomized local search heuristic to prevent the negotiation from stopping in locally optimal contracts. We show that the welfare could be increased by using a search strategy similar to Simulated Annealing. Unfortunately, a naive application of this strategy makes the agents vulnerable to exploitation by untruthful partners. We develop and test a straightforward mechanism based on trust accounts to protect the agents against systematic exploitation. This “Trusted” Simulated Annealing mechanism assures truthful revelation of the individual opportunity cost situation as the basis for the calculation of side payments.
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Stockheim, T., Wendt, O., König, W. (2006). Trust-Based Distributed Supply-Web Negotiations. In: Kirn, S., Herzog, O., Lockemann, P., Spaniol, O. (eds) Multiagent Engineering. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-32062-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-32062-8_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-31406-6
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