Using Saaty's Method in Contract Negotiations

This note (motivated by the STSM at the Imperial College London), is devoted to combining ontologically demarcated information with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP; [4]) for assessment of offers during contract negotiations. The AHP is widely used [1], while an attempt at combining it with ontologies was reported in [3]. Here, the context for the AHP method is provided by the Agents in Grid project (AiG; [5]), aiming at development of an agent-based infrastructure for resource management in the Grid where agents negotiate (1) joining a team to earn money, or (2) finding a team to execute a job, and ontologically described contracts result from autonomous negotiations. Therefore, multicriterial (AHP-based) assessment of proposals may be used to reach an agreement. Here, we consider how the AHP method can be used to assess ontologically described contract proposals in the AiG use case.