An Ontology to support automated negotiation

TL;DR

This paper presents an ontology designed to enhance automated negotiation in multiagent systems, enabling domain adaptation, reducing hardcoded knowledge, and improving interoperability across applications like ITS and e-commerce.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible ontology framework that supports negotiation strategies and domain-specific extensions, validated through a traffic light setting application in ITS.

Findings

Ontology improves negotiation flexibility

Reduces hardcoded knowledge in agents

Validated in intelligent transportation systems

Abstract

In this work we propose an ontology to support automated negotiation in multiagent systems. The ontology can be connected with some domain-specific ontologies to facilitate the negotiation in different domains, such as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), e-commerce, etc. The specific negotiation rules for each type of negotiation strategy can also be defined as part of the ontology, reducing the amount of knowledge hardcoded in the agents and ensuring the interoperability. The expressiveness of the ontology was proved in a multiagent architecture for the automatic traffic light setting application on ITS.