Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC)

From Negotiation

Please, check for the most recent update of this document at http://mmi.tudelft.nl/anac

The ANAC 2012 competition will be held in spring 2012, with the finals being run during the AAMAS 2012 conference. The prize money of the competition is US$1500. (The prize will be paid only if the number of participants is sufficient, that is at least 4 participants. In case if the number of participants is less than 8 the prize will be downgraded.)

To enter the competition you will have to register your team, and upload your agent through the registration site. The agent should work in the GENIUS environment. For the deadline for registration of the competition and rules, see the instructions.

Previous Competitions

For the results of 2010, please see our ANAC 2010 page

For the results of 2011, please see our ANAC 2011 page

1 Introduction and Motivation
2 Papers about ANAC
3 Organization Team
4 Previous results

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Introduction and Motivation

The purpose of the competition is to steer the research in the area bilateral multi-issue closed negotiation. Closed negotiation, when opponents do not reveal their preferences to each other, is an important class of real-life negotiations. Unfortunately, the game-theoretic approaches cannot be directly applied to design efficient negotiating agents due to the lack of information about opponent. Instead, heuristic approaches are widely used to design negotiating agents.

Negotiating agents designed using heuristic approach need extensive evaluation, typically through simulations and empirical analysis, since it is usually impossible to predict precisely how the system and the constituent agents will behave in a wide variety of circumstances. Furthermore, there is a need for the development of a best practice repository for negotiation techniques. That is, a coherent resource that describes which negotiation techniques are best suited to a given type of problem or domain. To facilitate research in the area of bilateral multi-issue negotiation the GENIUS system is developed. It allows easy development and integration of existing negotiating agents. GENIUS can be used to simulate individual negotiation sessions as well as tournaments between negotiating agents in various negotiation scenarios. It allows the specification of negotiation domains and preference profiles by means of a graphical user interface. GENIUS can be used to train human negotiators by means of negotiations against automated agents or other humans. Furthermore, it can be used to teach the design of generic automated negotiating agents.

The automated negotiating agents competition has the following aims:

Design of more efficient negotiating agents
Testing bidding and acceptance strategies
Exploring learning strategies and opponent models
Collecting the state-of-the-art negotiating agents, negotiation domains, and preference profiles and making them available for the negotiation research community and the communities working in related areas

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Papers about ANAC

We published a paper about the setup and results of ANAC 2010:

TIM BAARSLAG, KOEN HINDRIKS, CATHOLIJN M. JONKER, SARIT KRAUS, and RAZ LIN. 2010. The ﬁrst automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010). In New Trends in Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiations, Series of Studies in Computational Intelligence. Edited by T. Ito, M. Zhang, V. Robu, S. Fatima, and T. Matsuo. Springer-Verlag. (pdf) (bib)

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