View - ResearchGate

Challenges in ABSS of Negotiation 253flood, the importance of flood control and population safety became - for atime - more dominant. Also, individual plans for navigation, flood control andother issues were integrated eventually into a single plan under the aegis of theMaasverkenprojekt. On no occasion has full agreement been reached amongall of the negotiating parties.The first model reported here does not describe the actual issues but insteadrepresents the structure of the issues involved. Successive models will incorporatethe issues with increasing explicitness and no model will distort the issuesor relations among the negotiators "for the sake of simplicity".2.1 Abstract representation of agents’ positionsThe negotiating stance of each agent is represented by two digit strings.One string - the agent’s position string - represents the preferred outcome ofthe negotiating process with respect to each issue under discussion. The otherstring - the agent’s importance string - represents the importance the agentattaches to achieving its preferred outcome for each issue. For example, andagent’s desired outcomes might be represented by the position string[21423003241021]where the value at each index of the string is a representation of the desiredoutcome of the negotiating process for a particular issue. The issue correspondingto each index of the position string is the same for every agent. The numberof integer values that can be assigned to any position is determined by the modeloperator at the start of each simulation run with the model. In this case, thevalues taken at each index of the position string are in the interval [0,4].The corresponding importance string of the agent might be[31020331023101]indicating that the most important objectives of the agent (indicated by the3s in the importance string) are to obtain a value of 2 for the issue denoted bythe first digit of the strings and the value 0 for the sixth and seventh issues andthe value 1 for the 11th issue.The effect of the negotiation process is necessarily represented as changes inthe position strings of the participating agents. Moreover, although not implementedin the simulations reported below, it seems likely that the importanceattached to different positions will also change over the course of the negotiationprocess - perhaps as it becomes important to maintain common positionsimportant to partners which whom agreement has been reached.