Page 270 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Challenges in ABSS of Negotiation 253

flood, the importance of flood control and population safety became - for a
time - more dominant. Also, individual plans for navigation, flood control and
other issues were integrated eventually into a single plan under the aegis of the
Maasverkenprojekt. On no occasion has full agreement been reached among
all of the negotiating parties.
The first model reported here does not describe the actual issues but instead
represents the structure of the issues involved. Successive models will incorpo-
rate the issues with increasing explicitness and no model will distort the issues
or relations among the negotiators "for the sake of simplicity".

2.1 Abstract representation of agents’ positions

The negotiating stance of each agent is represented by two digit strings.
One string - the agent’s position string - represents the preferred outcome of
the negotiating process with respect to each issue under discussion. The other
string - the agent’s importance string - represents the importance the agent
attaches to achieving its preferred outcome for each issue. For example, and
agent’s desired outcomes might be represented by the position string

[2 14230 03241 021]

where the value at each index of the string is a representation of the desired
outcome of the negotiating process for a particular issue. The issue correspond-
ing to each index of the position string is the same for every agent. The number
of integer values that can be assigned to any position is determined by the model
operator at the start of each simulation run with the model. In this case, the
values taken at each index of the position string are in the interval [0,4].
The corresponding importance string of the agent might be

[3 10203 31023 101]

indicating that the most important objectives of the agent (indicated by the
3s in the importance string) are to obtain a value of 2 for the issue denoted by
the first digit of the strings and the value 0 for the sixth and seventh issues and
the value 1 for the 11th issue.
The effect of the negotiation process is necessarily represented as changes in
the position strings of the participating agents. Moreover, although not imple-
mented in the simulations reported below, it seems likely that the importance
attached to different positions will also change over the course of the negotia-
tion process - perhaps as it becomes important to maintain common positions
important to partners which whom agreement has been reached.