Resumen
Negotiation is a complex, difficult task for humans or software agents. By understanding the negotiation life cycle, an agent can apply tools at the appropriate time and place to improve negotiation processes, products and perspectives. In negotiation, participants bring their goals to a bargaining table, strategically share information and search for alternatives that are mutually beneficial. Negotiation is complex in that a global understanding of all goals, solutions and their interactions can be extremely complex. Participants may not know or want to reveal their goals and solutions for some goals may have complex interactions with the solutions for other goals. The interactions can lead to participant conflicts or coalitions. The negotiation life cycle addresses steps directly leading to, or following, the actual negotiation process. This includes the subprocesses of initial problem recognition, participant solicitation and communication, goal analysis, solution generation, solution selection, solution implementation and solution maintenance. The negotiation life cycle has many similarities with the software life cycle-partly because both are exercises in formalization. INSET: Automated Negotiation Techniques.