ICT in Education, Research and Industrial Applications: Integration, Harmonization and Knowledge Transfer
Vadim Ermolayev, Heinrich C. Mayr, H.C. Nikitechnko, M. Spivakovsy, M. Zavileysky, Grygoriy Zholtkevych, Heinrich C. Mayr · 2011
Collaboration workflows for human experts involved in distributed problem solving and acting in dynamic environments require advanced self-configuration mechanisms for optimal selection of service providers. Such dynamic environments, specific for example to problems like environmental management, disaster and crisis management, and high-risk project management, are characterized by continuously changing situations, occurrence of unexpected events, as well as high variability in resources’ availability. We propose a solution for selfconfiguration based on a framework for the development of flexible cooperative multi-issue one-to-many service negotiations. The framework allows two levels of dynamic configuration of negotiations. First, the negotiation protocol can by dynamically selected depending on the profiles of available service providers. Second, negotiation subject as well as the parameters of the negotiation protocol, can be dynamically set depending on the current requirements of the service requester. In this paper we illustrate the features of our framework for dynamic negotiations using an example of service contracting in the field of disaster management. We also provide initial experimental results concerning the effect of the dynamic selection of negotiation protocol onto the quality of the negotiation outcome as well as onto the communication complexity of interactions incurred during negotiations.