GENIUS 2

Genius2 is an open architecture for heterogeneous negotiating parties via the internet. It provides the basis for an implementation of a testbed for negotiating parties that includes a set of negotiation problems for benchmarking parties, a library of negotiation strategies, and analytical tools to evaluate an party's performance and their strategies allows user.

Genius2 overview

Genius2 contains a number of components

name	description	more information
the core	the data structures for issues, values, bids, profiles, events and actions, agents etc.	here
profilesserver	a web server that provides profiles and domain descriptions	​profiles server
partiesserver	A web server that provides instances of running parties to use for negotiation	​parties server
runserver	A web server that can run sessions and tournaments	​run server

You can either run these servers locally on either your computer or on your web server, or use a public server somewhere else.

For creating your own profile or party, you only need the core.

If you want to get a quick top-down idea how Genius2 works, we suggest to install the servers and contact the runserver to run a session.

Server choice, privacy and security =

You can choose to either run services privately, on your intranet, or completely open on the internet.

privacy need	configuration
completely private, no sharing with others	all services run on tomcat server(s) on your computer or intranet. Outside network access is blocked. You need copies of the profiles and parties (jar files) you want to run.
competition : share your party with the world, but not its code	You host your own partiesserver that is connected to the web*.
shared profile	profilesserver on own server or on an existing profilesserver on the web*
public party with built-in private profile	Hard-code the profile in the party. Party runs as in competition.
semi-private sessions/tournaments	Run your own runserver, possibly even from behind a firewall or on your local computer. Existing parties- and profilesservers are used in your runs. Negotiation results are handled only on your computer and not visible outside. Others might be able to see agents act on your behalf, but it's not trivial to determine that they are negotiating against each other, especially if these parties are on different partiesservers.
run your own protocols	as with running semi-private sessions/tournaments

• All firewalls above the server have to be configured appropriately, most corporations have firewalls between your computer and inside the company there is only connection between company computers.

Core overview

This section gives an overview of the core functionalties.

The image below gives an overview class diagram with the genius2 core modules and their functionalities. The figure also shows the 3 servers and the functions inside those.

All classes are documented in detail in the javadoc with the code. Also the serialization is annotated with the classes. Here we just give a brief overview. Later in this document we explain the serialization of a domain and profile. Also check the examples to see how this works and what typical values look like.

issuevalue

This module contains the basic objects that make up a bid: issues, values, domains, and bids. The issues are just String objects. There are 2 types of values: numeric and discrete. DiscreteValueSet contains the list of DiscreteValue which is a basically a possible (string) values for the issue. NumberValueSet contains a Range which is a set of numbers defined by the minimum, maximum and stepsize (upwards from the minimum). A Domain contains a map, with each key the issue (string) and the value a ValueSet. Finally, a Bid is a Map where the key is the issue and the value either a DiscreteValue or NumberValue that is valid for that issue.

Your party can create any bid that it likes but the protocol will check if your bid fits in the current negotiation and may kick you out of the negotiation if you don't behave properly.

All number values are computed as BigDecimal to avoid rounding errors.

profile

A profile is a function that can tell if a bid is preferred over another bid. There are a number of ways to do this:

• FullyOrderedSpace: this provides a function isPreferredOrEqual() that can tell if a bid is preferred over another
• PartiallyOrderedSpace: as FullyOrderedSpace, but may not know the answer for part of the bids
• UtilitySpace: as FullyOrderedSpace, but additionally this provides a function getUtility(bid) that maps the bid into a real in [0,1]. The higher the value, the more preferred is that bid.

Party

The party module contains basic interfaces for implementing your negotiation party. The main class is Party, which defines the basic functionality required for every negotiation party. The heart of the party is that your Party implements Connectable<Inform,Action>. Connectable contains 2 main functions: connect and disconnect. When connect is called, your party receives a Connection over which it receives Inform objects and can send Action objects. What exactly is sent and received is determined by the protocol (see the protocol section below). For example if the SAOP protocol is used, your party will receive a YourTurn message, after which it decides on its action and sends it into the Connection. See also the example agent discussed below.

The Inform objects are all available inside the inform package inside the party module.

Timeline

The timeline contains a deadline and a progress object. The deadline indicates how much time a negotiation session can take. The progress indicates where currently running session is towards the deadline.

References

Parties, domains, profiles and protocols are stored and used on remote machines. We use IRI's (internationalized resource identifier, which looks similar to the well known URLs you use in your web browser) to refer to them. These IRI's are packed inside objects like the PartyRef, ProtocolRef, ProfileRef, DomainRef so that it is clear what type of object the IRI is referring to. For example, when your party is initialized, it usually receives a Settings object that contains a ProfileRef. The intention is that the party fetches the actual profile from the web, using the IRI in the ProtocolRef. See the example agent below for an example.

BidSpace

The bidspace module contains functionality to support building a negotiation party. We currently have

• OpponentModel: this is a category of classes that can estimate the opponent's profile from the bids that he places.
• Pareto: this is a category of classes that can compute the pareto frontier from a set of profiles. Pareto optimality is an important mechanism to place optimal bids.
• AllBidsList: this can be used to craete a list containing all possible bids in a domain. This list is created in a lazy way, and competely avoids storing the whole list in memory (which might not even fit)

Protocol

The protocol module contains the functionality to define and execute a negotiation protocol. There are session protocols and tournament protocols.

The basic classes defining a sessionprotocol are:

• The sessionsettings: these define the settings for the protocol, such as the deadline, the participants and the profile
• The sessionstate: this contains the current state of execution of the protocol. To give some example states: "waiting for bid from party 2", "ended with agreement", "ended because party 1 broke the protocol". A state also has various with() functions defining the new state from an old state and a party doing an action.
• The sessionprotocol: this defines what happens when a session starts, when a participant enters halfway the session, and what the current state is.

Writing a party in Java

Example parties can be found ​here. An agent is compiled with maven. After compilation (mvn package) you get a target/yourparty-X.Y.Z-jar-with-dependencies.jar that can be copied into the parties server for deployment.

The basic structure of an agent looks like this

public class RandomParty extends DefaultParty {
	@Override
	public void notifyChange(Inform info) {
		// System.out.println("Received info:" + info);
		if (info instanceof Settings) {
			fetchProfile(((Settings) info).getProfile());
			this.me = ((Settings) info).getID();
		} else if (info instanceof ActionDone) {
			lastActor = ((ActionDone) info).getAction().getActor();
			Action otheract = ((ActionDone) info).getAction();
			if (otheract instanceof Offer) {
				lastReceivedBid = ((Offer) otheract).getBid();
			}
		} else if (info instanceof YourTurn) {
			myTurn();
		}
	}

	private void myTurn() {
		Action action;
		if (lastReceivedBid != null && profileint.getProfile()
				.getUtility(lastReceivedBid).doubleValue() > 0.6) {
			action = new Accept(lastActor, lastReceivedBid);
		} else {
			AllBidsList bidspace = new AllBidsList(getProfile().getDomain());
			long i = random.nextInt(bidspace.size().intValue());
			action = new Offer(me, bidspace.get(BigInteger.valueOf(i)));
		}
		try {
			getConnection().send(action);
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}

	}

	@Override
	public Capabilities getCapabilities() {
			return new Capabilities(new HashSet<>(
					Arrays.asList(new ProtocolRef(new URI("SAOP")))));
	}

	@Override
	public String getDescription() {
		return "places random bids until it can accept an offer with utility >0.6";
	}

}

Preparing the jar file

In order to put your agent on the ​partiesserver for running, you need a jar file of your party.

Normally the party includes all dependencies. The jar files are loaded with an isolated jar class loader that should avoid collisions with possibly identically named but possibly different packages in other jar files.

Party jar files must have a Main-Class set in the MANIFEST.MF file. This main-class must implement Party and have a no-arg constructor.

The example randomagent does this from the maven build script.

We recommend to do initialization of the party only in the init() and not in the constructor or static code. This because instances of your class can be made both for extracting general info as getDescription(), or to really run your class.

Create Domain/Profiles

This section discusses how domains and profiles are created.

Create a domain

There is not yet a domain editor available so you have to create domains by manually editing a file with JSON code.

A domain looks like this

{"name":"jobs",
 "issuesValues":{
  "lease car":{"values":["yes","no"]},
  "permanent contract":{"values":["yes","no"]},
  "career development opportunities":{"values":["low","medium","high"]},
  "fte":{"values":["0.6","0.8","1.0"]},
  "salary":{"values":["2000","2500","3000","3500","4000"]},
  "work from home":{"values":["0","1","2"]}
 }
}

• The name is just a string. It must match the filename and directory name when placed on the profiles server. So your directory must be domainsrepo/jobs and the filename must be jobs.json.
• The issueValues contains a dictionary with issues. Each issue is indicated by a name (a string), followed by a column (:) and then a dictionary. The dictionary can contain either a discrete valueset or a number valueset
  • a discrete valueset looks like "values", a column and then a list of discrete values (all strings)
  • a number valueset contains a range of numbers and looks like {"range":["12.2","12.6","0.3"]} so "range:" followed by a list of 3 values. The first value is the minimum value in the range, the second the maximum value in the range, and the third the step value. This example range thus contains 12.2 and 12.5 (the next one would be 12.8 but that is already outside the range).

Create a profile

A profile is usually created after the domain. An example linear additive profile looks like this

{
	"LinearAdditiveUtilitySpace": {
		"issueUtilities": {
			"salary": {
				"discreteutils": {
					"valueUtilities": {
						"2000": 0,
						"2500": 0.25,
						"3000": 0.3,
						"3500": 0.75,
						"4000": 1.0
					}
				}
			},
			"fte": {
				"discreteutils": {
					"valueUtilities": {
						"0.6": 0.25,
						"0.8": 0.5,
						"1.0": 0.75
					}
				}
			},
			"work from home": {
.....
					}
				}
			}
		},
		"issueWeights": {
			"salary": 0.24,
			"fte": 0.32,
			"work from home": 0.18,
			"lease car": 0.06,
			"permanent contract": 0.16,
			"career development opportunities": 0.04
		},
		"domain": {
			"name": "jobs", .....
		},
		"name": "jobs1"
	}
}

This is an "LinearAdditiveYtilitySpace", other utilityspaces would have different contents. It contains a number of components:

• issueUtilities. Here, each issue value from the domain gets a utility assigned. The two types of issue values each having their matching utility function:

Issue Value class	Utility class	json serialization example
DiscreteValue	DiscreteValueSetUtilities	"discreteutils": { "valueUtilities": { "2000": 0, "2500": 0.25, "3000": 0.3, "3500": 0.75, "4000": 1.0 } }
NumberValue	NumberValueSetUtilities	numberutils": { "lowValue":12, "lowUtility":0.3, "highValue":18, "highUtility":0.6 }

• issueWeights: this is a map, for each issue there is a value in [0,1] and the sum of the weights in this map must be exactly 1.

• domain: identical to above. We replaced some issueValues with "..." in this example .
• name: a simple string with the name of the profile. The name must match the filename of the profile.

Bids

A Bid is a map with the issue names as keys (strings) and the values being an element from the valueset as in the domain description.

A bid typically looks like

{ "salary":"2000", "fte":"0.8", "work from home","0.6" ...}

Value workaround

This example also illustrates a problem with the json parser. In our jobs example domain, fte is a discrete value, so "0.8" is just a string, not a number. However if fte would be a numeric issue, we naively would write the 0.8 without quotes: fte:0.8. However due to the way the json parser works, we would get 0.8 parsed as s double. This introduces rounding errors. And these cause all kinds of problems.

To avoid these rounding errors, the solution is to store the decimal value also in a string. We can then later convert it properly.

However if we store it in a string, we would be unable to distinguish it from a discrete value. To work around this, we put it in a string and prepend it with a "=".

• "0.8": the DiscreteValue
• "=0.8": the NumberValue.

This workaround is only needed for issue values like in bids. In other places where we can *only* have double values, we can work around the issue without needing the string trick.

Genius2 sources

downloading source code

You can browse the genius2 core sources directly using the browse button at the right top of this page.

You can download the source code of this component from

​https://tracinsy.ewi.tudelft.nl/svn/genius2/

Import all sources in Eclipse

Normal developers that write new parties do not need to install the genius2 source code. This is only needed if you want to debug/trace into the genius2 code for instance for debugging or understanding the inner workings of genius2.

Install Subclipse using "help/Eclipse MarketPlace" and search for subclipse. Disable the JavaHL native DLLs and install. NOTE: due to a bug in Eclipse Photon the marketplace may not work. We suggest to upgrade...

You may get some errors on JavaHL library. To get rid of those, go to preferences/Team/SVN/

• disable General SVN settings / JavaHL
• SVN interface/Client: select SVNKit instead of JavaHL.

Right click in Package Explorer in Eclipse, select "Import/SVN/Checkout Projects from SVN". Select the root of the project, finish (selecting sub-projects will result in a stupid loop in the checkout procedure in Eclipse and won't lead anywhere...)

Richt click on the checked-out project that you want eclipse to recognise as Maven project (the project are maven but Eclipse does not recognise this after check-out). Select import/maven/existing maven projects. Finish.

Note. Eclipse does not automatically recognise this as a maven project because Eclipse supports this only with GIT repositories while we use SVN.