Commitment-based negotiation semantics for accountability in multi-agent systems

Negotiation is a key form of interaction in multi-agent systems. Negotiation enables agents to come to a mutual agreement about a goal or plan of action. Current negotiation approaches use traditional interaction protocols which do not capture the normative meaning of interactions and often restrict agent autonomy. These traditional negotiation approaches also have difficulty specifying accountability. This paper seeks to address this gap in maintaining autonomy and capturing accountability during negotiation through the use of normative commitments. We propose Nala, a commitment-based negotiation semantics. Nala uses commitments to provide normative meaning to agent interactions. The nature of commitments support in capturing accountability through the violation of created commitments. We illustrate Nala’s usage via a case study using a game scenario where agents participate in negotiation to bring about their goals in a research constrained environment.