GDL as a unifying domain description language for declarative automated negotiation

Recently, it has been proposed that Game Description Language (GDL) could be used to define negotiation domains. This would open up an entirely new, declarative , approach to Automated Negotiations in which a single algorithm could negotiate over any domain, as long as that domain is expressible in GDL. However, until now, the feasibility of this approach has only been demonstrated on a few toy-world problems. Therefore, in this paper we show that GDL is a truly unifying language that can also be used to define more general and more complex negotiation domains. We demonstrate this by showing that some of the most commonly used test-beds in the Automated Negotiations literature, namely Genius and Colored Trails, can be described in GDL. More specifically, we formally prove that the set of possible agreements of any negotiation domain from Genius (either linear or non-linear) can be modeled as a set of strategies over a deterministic extensive-form game. Furthermore, we show that this game can be effectively described in GDL and we show experimentally that, given only this GDL description, we can explore the agreement space efficiently using entirely generic domain-independent algorithms. In addition, we show that the same holds for negotiation domains in the Colored Trails framework. This means that one could indeed implement a single negotiating agent that is capable of negotiating over a broad class of negotiation domains, including Genius and Colored Trails.