Argument-Based Decision Making and Negotiation in E-Business: Contracting a Land Lease for a Computer Assembly Plant

We describe an extensive application of argument-based decision making and negotiation to a real-world scenario in which an investor agent and an estate manager agent negotiate to lease a land for a computer assembly factory. Agents are equipped with beliefs, goals, preferences, and argument-based decision-making mechanisms taking uncertainties into account. Goals are classified as either structural or contractual. The negotiation process is divided into two phases. In the first phase, following a recently proposed framework [8] the investor agent find suitable locations based on its structural goals such as requirements about transportation; the estate manager agent determines favored tenants based on its structural goals such as requirements about resource conservation. In the second phase, we introduce a new novel argumentbased negotiation protocol for agents to agree on contract to fulfill their contractual goals such as waste disposal cost.