A heuristic approach to proposal-based negotiation: With applications in fashion supply chain management

In this paper, we extend and improve the formal, executable framework for automated multi-issue negotiation between two autonomous competitive software agents proposed by Cadoli. This model is based on the view of negotiation spaces (or "areas"), representing the admissible values of the goods involved in the process as convex regions. However, in order to speed up the negotiation process and guarantee convergence, there was the restriction of potential agreements to vertices included in the intersection of the two areas. We present and assess experimentally an extension to Cadoli's approach where, for both participating agents, interaction is no longer vertex based, or at least not necessarily so. This eliminates the asymmetry among parties and the limitation to polyhedral negotiation areas. The extension can be usefully integrated to Cadoli's framework, thus obtaining an enhanced algorithm that can be effective in many practical cases. We present and discuss a number of experiments, aimed at assessing how parameters influence the performance of the algorithm and how they relate to each other. We discuss the usefulness of the approach in relevant application fields, such as, for instance, supply chain management in the fashion industry, which is a field of growing importance in economy and e-commerce. © 2013 Stefania Costantini et al.