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252 Socially Intelligent AgentsIt is clear that the examples of difficult negotiations involve both more partiesand larger numbers of related issues than do the examples of regularly successfulnegotiations. But there is a second difference, as well. The examples of successare negotiations among two parties and if the parties are in fact composed ofseveral individuals, within each party there are no differences of goals. Whereasthe large scale negotiations generally have to reconcile a wide range of interests.In Northern Ireland, there are ranges of both Loyalist and Nationalist groupsand there are frequently violent incidents among such groups within the samesectarian community. An analogous description would be apposite to the Israeli-Palestinian or many other difficult, apparently bilateral, negotiations.This paper is an interim report on the development of techniques for modellingmultilateral negotiation. To model bilateral negotiation turns out be verystraightforward but, though the modelling framework was set up to extend easilyto represent negotiation among any number of parties, it is extraordinarilydifficult to capture the process of convergence of positions among three or moreparties. The nature of the difficulties encountered suggest that models of failednegotiations provide insights into the reasons why difficulties are encounteredin real social processes. A promising means of learning about processes ofsuccessful multilateral negotiations is to describe real instances of successfulmultilateral negotiations with agent based social simulation models.An elaboration of this suggestion is presented in the concluding section 5 onthe basis of the model described in some detail in section 3, the results of themodel with two and then with more than two negotiating agents is presented insection 4.2. A Model Of Multi Lateral NegotiationThe model reported here is the prototype for a description of stakeholdernegotiation in the Limberg basis of the River Meuse. There are seven suchstakeholders and a large number of issues to be resolved.The stakeholders are ministries of the Netherlands national government, theprovincial government of Limberg, farmers, NGOs (mainly concerned with thecreation of nature reserves), shipping companies, gravel extraction companies,households and community organisations. The issues being negotiated includeflood control, navigation, gravel extraction, the creation and maintenance ofnature reserves, agriculture. There are manifold - certainly more than two -outcomes for many of the individual negotiating issues. Consequently, anysuitable representation of the negotiating process has to take into account themultiplicity of stakeholders, issues and outcomes for each issue.Over the past decade, there have been several plans with changing objectivesfor the Meuse. The structure of these plans, and the relative importance of theirobjectives, has changed with each of two major floods in the 1990s. After each