The 3rd International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2012) - Call for participation

[Tim Baarslag]

The 3rd International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2012)

In conjunction with AAMAS 2012.

June 4-8, 2012, Valencia, Spain

http://anac2012.ecs.soton.ac.uk <http://anac2012.ecs.soton.ac.uk/>

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

(Please see the section 'Changes with respect to ANAC 2011' for the 
updated part of this call for participation.)
After the successes of the previous two years, we would like to invite 
you to participate in the third Automated Negotiating Agents Competition 
(ANAC). This competition brings together researchers from the 
negotiation community and provides a unique benchmark for evaluating 
practical negotiation strategies in multi-issue domains. In particular, 
the goals include of the competition include: (i) to encourage the 
design of practical negotiation agents that can proficiently negotiate 
against unknown opponents and in a variety of circumstances, (ii) to 
provide a benchmark for objectively evaluating different negotiation 
strategies, (iii) to explore different learning and adaptation 
strategies and opponent models, and (iv) to collect state-of-the-art 
negotiating agents and negotiation scenarios, and making them available 
to the wider research community.

ENTRANTS

The aim for the entrants to the competition is to develop an autonomous 
negotiation agent as well as submit a negotiation scenario. Performance 
of the agents will then be evaluated in a tournament setting, where each 
agent is matched with all other submitted agents, and each pair of 
agents will negotiate in each submitted negotiation scenario. 
Negotiations are repeated several times to obtain statistically 
significant results. The winning agent will be the one with the highest 
overall score.

A negotiation scenario consists of a specification of the objectives and 
issues to be resolved by means of negotiation. This includes the 
preferences of both negotiating parties about the possible agreements. 
The preferences of a party are modelled using linearly additive, 
multi-issue utility functions.

RULES OF ENCOUNTER

Negotiations are bilateral and based on the alternating-offers protocol. 
Offers are exchanged in real time with a deadline after 3 minutes. This 
means that the number of offers exchanged within a certain time period 
varies and depends on the computation required by the agents. If no 
agreement is reached by the deadline, or if either agent chooses to 
terminate the negotiation before the deadline, both agents receive their 
utility of conflict. In addition, there will be a discount factor in 
about half of the domains, where the value of an agreement decreases 
over time.

The challenge for an agent is to negotiate without any knowledge of the 
opponent's preferences and strategy. Although each agent participates in 
many negotiation sessions, against different opponents, and in a wide 
variety of negotiation scenarios, agents cannot learn between 
negotiations. This means that negotiation agents only have the 
opportunity to adapt and learn from the offers they receive within a 
single negotiation session.

CHANGES WITH RESPECT TO ANAC 2011

This year's competition introduces, for the first time, a private 
reservation value as part of the tournament. The reservation value of an 
agent is the utility of conflict, and is achieved if either the agent 
fails to reach an agreement by the deadline, or if one of the agents 
terminates the negotiation. The reservation values can be different for 
each agent and for each negotiation scenario. An agent only knows its 
own reservation value, and not that of its opponent. The reservation 
value is discounted in the same way that an agreement would be. This 
makes it rational, in certain circumstances, for an agent to terminate 
an agreement early, in order to take the reservation value with a 
smaller loss due to discounting.

GENIUS

The negotiation tournament is run using the java-based GENIUS 
negotiation platform, which has been developed to facilitate research in 
the area of bilateral multi-issue negotiation. It has an open 
architecture that allows for easy development and integration of 
existing negotiating agents using design patterns. GENIUS can be used to 
simulate individual negotiation sessions as well as tournaments between 
negotiating agents in various negotiation scenarios. The core 
functionality of the system includes: (1) specification of negotiation 
domains and preference profiles; (2) simulation of a bilateral 
negotiation between agents; and (3) analysis of the negotiation outcomes 
and negotiation dynamics. It furthermore allows the specification of 
negotiation domains and preference profiles by means of a graphical user 
interface.

This year's competition will use version 3.2.1 of the GENIUS platform. 
The platform, together with the agents and scenarios from the previous 
competitions are available at:

http://mmi.tudelft.nl/genius

To learn more about the 2012 negotiation tournament see:

http://anac2012.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

QUALIFYING ROUND AND FINALS

There will be an initial qualifying rounds, and the top 8 performing 
agents will continue to the finals, which will be held at the AAMAS 
conference.

It is expected that teams that make it through to the finals will have a 
representative attending the AAMAS 2011 conference. Each team in the 
final will have the opportunity to give a brief presentation describing 
their agent.

PRIZES

There is a generous total reward of US$1500 which will be divided 
between the top performing entrants. More details about the prizes will 
be announced on the ANAC 2012 website:

http://anac2012.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

IMPORTANT DATES

* 18 March, 2012. The deadline for submitting agents and domains for the 
qualifying round.
* 15 April 2012.  Announcement of the 8 finalists.
* June 4-8, 2012.  Final competition and presentations at the 
International Workshop on Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiations 
(ACAN 2012). ACAN 2012 will have a special session for presentations for 
ANAC teams.

CONTACT

For any questions, or if you would like to unsubscribe to any future 
e-mails, the main local contact is:

Colin R. Williams crw104 at ecs.soton.ac.uk <mailto:crw104 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>

LOCAL ORGANISERS

* Colin R. Williams, University of Southampton
* Valentin Robu, University of Southampton
* Enrico Gerding, University of Southampton
* Nicolas R. Jennings, University of Southampton

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

* Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology
* Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology
* Sarit Kraus, University of Maryland and Bar-Ilan University
* Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology
* Raz Lin, Bar-Ilan University
* Tim Baarslag, Delft University of Technology

SPONSORS

Makoto Lab., Inc.


---
Tim Baarslag
T.Baarslag at tudelft.nl <mailto:T.Baarslag at tudelft.nl>
PhD Researcher
Man-Machine Interaction Group
Delft University of Technology

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