An Extended Multi-Agent Negotiation Protocol

摘要

This article presents a task allocation protocol that is efficient in time and tolerates crash failures in multi-agent systems. The protocol is an extension of the negotiation protocol defined by Smith and Davis [25, 26] for task allocation. Our extension of the Contract Net Protocol (1) enables an agent to manage several negotiation processes in parallel; (2) optimizes the length of the negotiation processes among agents; (3) reduces the contractors' decommitment situations; (4) enables the detection of failures of an agent participating in a negotiation process and prevents a negotiation process with blocked agents.