Temporality, Priorities and Delegation in an E-Commerce Environment

Logic presents itself as a major tool in the development of formal descriptions for agentbased systems; indeed, Logic Programming (LP) and specially Extended Logic Programming (ELP) provide a powerful tool for the development of such systems, besides being mathematically correct (and subject to proof) are easy to prototype. On the other hand Electronic Commerce (EC) poses new challenges in the areas of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) and formal modeling, where specific agent architectures are mandatory. In this work such a problem will be approached by the Experience-Based Mediator (EBM) agent one, particularly suited to take into account the argumentation processes that are inherent to any EC deal. The last but not least, although logic has been successfully used in the areas of argumentation (specially, legal argumentation), the reasoning process that happens before hand is rarely stated. In EC scenarios, such process takes into account features such as temporality, priorities, delegation, making use of incomplete information, and leading to feasible EC systems.