A Ragone, T Di Noia, FM Donini, E Di Sciascio, and MP Wellman

Third International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management, pages 193–205, September 2009.

includes material from a paper presented at the AAMAS-09 Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT)

Abstract

We propose a framework to compute the utility of an agreement w.r.t a preference set in a negotiation process. In particular, we refer to preferences expressed as weighted formulas in a decidable fragment of First-order Logic and agreements expressed as a formula. We ground our framework in Description Logics (DL) endowed with disjunction, to be compliant with Semantic Web technologies. A logic based approach to preference representation allows, when a background knowledge base is exploited, to relax the often unrealistic assumption of additive independence among attributes. We provide suitable definitions of the problem and present algorithms to compute utility in our setting. We also validate our approach through an experimental evaluation.