Abstract

Providing services is rapidly growing to be the trend of the future because of the added value it delivers to consumers. The growth in providing services is reflected in the development of new classes of service providers: Internet Services Providers (ISP) and Applications Services-Providers (ASP). In a heterogeneous dynamic community of software agents, that communicate with each other, conflicts are unavoidable. Negotiation among the conflicting agents is one way to resolve conflicts. Providing an 'independent service' to the community of agents that is specialized in handling negotiations, is the focus of this thesis. We propose a Negotiation Service Provider (NSP) that provides negotiation services to an agent community. When an agent detects a conflict, it contracts a NSP to negotiate on its behalf. NSP investigates the conflict and, selects the most suitable negotiation protocol available from its protocol suite. With this protocol, NSP conducts the negotiation with the conflicting agent on behalf of its client agent. In this thesis, we design an architecture for a NSP. The different modules of this architecture and their interactions are presented. Then, we discuss the integration of NSP into the agents' community. We propose a representation scheme for conflicts between agents. This scheme along with a data structure called Protocol-Constraint Table (PCT) guides NSPs negotiation agent in the protocol selection process. We introduce a method to integrate new negotiation protocols in NSP's protocol suite. This method is demonstrated by using three classical negotiation protocols