A multi-agent negotiation testbed for contracting tasks with temporal and precedence constraints

In multi-agent contracting, customer agents solicit the resources and capabilities of other agents, sometimes executing multistep tasks in which tasks are contracted out to different suppliers. The authors have developed a testbed for studying the decision behaviors of agents in this context. It generates sets of tasks with known statistical attributes, formulates and submits requests for quotations, generates bids with well-defined statistics, and evaluates bids according to several criteria. Each of these processes is supported by an abstract interface and a series of pluggable modules with numerous configuration parameters, and with data collection and analysis tools.