Formally Defining Coordination Processes to Support Contract Negotiation

The literature and practice of negotiation and auctions, especially in the burgeoning area of electronic commerce, demonstrate that there is a wide and rapidly growing variety of negotiation and auction processes both in use and proposed. We believe that in the future automated online auctions will become a fundamental building block for contract negotiation carried out electronically. To avoid loss of money or bad decision making, it is important for organizations to have high confidence in the software involved in these activities. We are writing a range of negotiation processes in Little-JIL, an agent coordination language that addresses goals of expressiveness, analyzability, and executability. With Little-JIL, we can express processes involving the coordination of the multiple participants involved in contract negotiation and do so in a syntax that allows an intuitive understanding to non-programmers. Furthermore, the language has a formal semantics that allows us to prove certain properties of the negotiation processes. Finally, the language also has executable semantics allowing us to directly execute the validated processes. We believe that this combination of capabilities makes Little-JIL a valuable language for the definition of distributed, multi-agent processes for which we want high assurance.