Content-oriented composite service negotiation with complex preferences

In e-commerce, for some cases the service requested by the consumer cannot be fulfilled by the producer. In such cases, service consumers and producers need to negotiate their service requirements and offers. Whereas some multiagent negotiation approaches treat the price as the primary construct for negotiation, we consider that the service content is as much important as the price. Therefore, this study mainly focuses on the content of the service described in a common ontology accessed by both agents for common understanding. Acquiring user’s preferences and acting upon these preferences are crucial tasks for a consumer agent as far as the negotiation is concerned. Since the size of complete preference information increases exponentially with the number of attributes and size of domain, it is required to keep these preferences in a compact way. There are a variety of ways of representing preferences and using these structures for automatic generation of consumer’s request. This research develops an automated negotiation approach in which the consumer takes the preferences of the user in an efficient way and uses these preferences in the generation of request. For this purpose, we design several strategies to generate requests to take the best offer by the producer. On the other side, in order to obtain a more effective negotiation results the producer tries to learn the consumer preferences from the bid exchanges incrementally in order to refine its offer over time. Furthermore, for some complicated services desired by the consumer, a single producer by itself may not meet the consumer’s needs. In such cases, the system should allow consumers negotiating with multiple service producers as far as composite services are concerned.