title: Evolving fuzzy rules for relaxed-criteria negotiation.
abstract: In the literature on automated negotiation, very few negotiation agents are designed with the flexibility to slightly relax their negotiation criteria to reach a consensus more rapidly and with more certainty. Furthermore, these relaxed-criteria negotiation agents were not equipped with the ability to enhance their performance by learning and evolving their relaxed-criteria negotiation rules. The impetus of this work is designing market-driven negotiation agents (MDAs) that not only have the flexibility of relaxing bargaining criteria using fuzzy rules, but can also evolve their structures by learning new relaxed-criteria fuzzy rules to improve their negotiation outcomes as they participate in negotiations in more e-markets. To this end, an evolutionary algorithm for adapting and evolving relaxed-criteria fuzzy rules was developed. Implementing the idea in a testbed, two kinds of experiments for evaluating and comparing EvEMDAs (MDAs with relaxed-criteria rules that are evolved using the evolutionary algorithm) and EMDAs (MDAs with relaxed-criteria rules that are manually constructed) were carried out through stochastic simulations. Empirical results show that: 1) EvEMDAs generally outperformed EMDAs in different types of e-markets and 2) the negotiation outcomes of EvEMDAs generally improved as they negotiated in more e-markets.
authors.affiliation: Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. prof_sim_2002@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Kwang Mong
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Sim
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D017143:Fuzzy Logic; D005716:Game Theory; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D017008:Negotiating / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods