The negotiation strategies are usually a set of rules that specify how to initiate the negotiation and what to do in response to a received message. The messages contain KQML-based utterances. Each message has a primitive such as tell and ask, the sender, the receiver, a subject which is the entity that the message is concerned with, such as the cup radius value, and two other slots containing the body of the message. Three example messages are shown in tables 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3.
Table 6.1: An ``ask alternative'' message
Table 6.2: A ``tell no alternative'' message
Table 6.3: An ``ask relaxation'' message