Research On Agent Negotiation Based Team Formation Problem Under The Incentive Mechanism

Nowadays, more and more scholars pay attention to the team formation problem. In the team formation problem, the goal of the team leader is to make the team members form a team to solve a task or achieve the goal of the team collaboratively. Nowadays, the team formation problem mainly concerned the properties of the team members and the selection and allocation of the team members. Most of these researches solve the team formation problem from the aspect of the team and assure the team benefits. However, these researchers pay no attention to the opinions of the team members. In fact, the team members are willing to express their opinions during the team formation process and they have different preferences for the team positions. So the aim of the paper is to consider the opinions of the both side of the team during the team formation process and meanwhile to assure the success of the team formation.First of all, the paper describes the basic team formation process and analyzes the disadvantages of the unilateral decision of the team leader during the team formation process. So it is very important to consider the bilateral decision in the team formation by considering the problem existed in the unilateral decision. For the advantages of the negotiation and the agent technology, the agent negotiation based team formation problem is proposed. In addition, the payoff-based incentive mechanism is introduced to solve the conflicts. Then the paper describes the main elements of the agent negotiation based team formation problem and the main steps of the team formation process. Second, the math model of the problem is constructed from the aspects of the offer, the utility function of the team members, the incentive mechanism and the utility function of the team leader. Then the agent negotiation based team formation algorithm is proposed to solve the team formation problem. The algorithm is composed of leader agent based negotiation algorithm and team members based negotiation algorithm. Each of the algorithm solves the negotiation problem of corresponding agent and two kind of algorithm are merge to solve the team formation problem.The experiment results indicate that the agent negotiation based team formation problem can be solved effectively in the different team formation environments. And the team based on the agent negotiation can better meet the benefits of the team members. In addition, the effectiveness of conflict resolution and the role of incentive mechanism in the team formation have been verified in the experiments.