I missed my weekly meeting with my advisor last week because of meetings at work that ran late. I didn’t mind much, because I hadn’t made a lot of progress on the task he set me the previous week. He asked me to look into devising a protocol that service agents could use to negotiate among themselves to offer better deals to potential users.

After looking into possible agent communication protocols, it was obvious that the Contract Net Protocol and Iterated  Contract Net Protocol published by Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) met the needs of the mechanics of the communication if not the content. All of the work I could find that related to contract negotiation among agents used one of these protocols as the basis for their negotiation. So I turned my attention to the content of the communications, but I wasn’t making much progress.

Missing the meeting worked out well; I had a flash of inspiration earlier this week. I can use the Contract Net protocols for the mechanics of the communication, and on top of that I can layer a means for agents to know what other agents are in their potential workflow with them, then adjust their initial offer up or down based on their affinity for each of their neighbors.

I explained my idea to my advisor during out meeting this week, which went very well. In fact, it went a little too well. He liked the idea enough that he thought we could put together a paper for a conference whose deadline is “at the end of the month.” That’s the good news. The bad news is that deadline isn’t really the end of the month. It’s actually October 24. As in Monday; as in four days from our meeting yesterday.

So I spent a fair bit of last night writing furiously, and I’ll do the same tonight. I let my advisor know that unless the deadline has been moved the paper is due Monday, but I’d have him something within 48 hours.

It’s going to be a long night.