Title:            An Efficient Negotiation Protocol to Achieve Socially Optimal Allocation
Speaker:   Prof. Ho-fung Leung（The Chinese University of Hong Kong）
Time:         Jun.7th.2012, 15:00pm-16:00pm
Venue:        Lecture room, Second floor of B8 Building ,South SCUT
Organizer: School of Software Engineering

Abstract：
Negotiation-based resource allocation among multiple agents is an important topic in multi-agent system research and it can be applied in various practical domains including network bandwidth allocation, robotics and grid computing. However, it is quite challenging to achieve efficient negotiation among agents due to the huge space of all possible deals. A number of negotiation protocols have been proposed to guide the agents to reach desirable allocations over resources. However, previous work puts too many constraints on the negotiation environment and thus greatly limits its applicability. To address this limitation, in this paper, we present an efficient protocol within a more general negotiation framework, which can lead agents to achieve socially optimal allocation. We theoretically prove that the final allocation is guaranteed to be socially optimal provided that the agents are cooperative-individually rational. Besides, extensive simulation results show that the complexities of the negotiation process are greatly reduced under our protocol from both communication and computational aspects.

Introduction of Prof. Ho-fung Leung:
Professor Ho-fung Leung is a Professor and the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Leung received his BSc and MPhil degrees in Computer Science from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and his PhD degree and DIC (Diploma of Imperial College) in Computing from Imperial College London. His research interests cover various aspects centring around artificial intelligence and the web, including ontologies, intelligent agents, self-organising systems, complex systems, social computing, service-oriented architectures, and cloud computing. Professor Leung has authored about 200 papers, including 3 research monographs, and edited 3 volumes. Professor Leung was the chairperson of ACM (Hong Kong Chapter) in 1998. He is a Chartered Fellow of the BCS, a Senior Member of both the ACM and the IEEE, and a full member the HKCS. He is a Chartered Engineer registered by the Engineering Council.