Knowledge-Based e-Contract Negotiation among Agents Using Semantic Web Technologies

E-Commerce enabled new ways of transactions. Companies and individuals negotiate and make contracts every day. Practically, contracts are agreements between parties that must be kept. These agreements affect the involved parties irretrievably. Hence, negotiating them efficiently is proved vital. To this end we propose the use of intelligent agents, which benefit from Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF and RuleML, for data and policy exchanges. Each agent encounter is characterized by the interaction or negotiation protocol and each party’s strategy. This study defines a knowledge-based negotiation procedure where protocols and strategies are separated enabling reusability and thus enabling agent participation in interaction processes without the need of reprogramming. In addition, we present the integration of this methodology into a multi-agent knowledge-based framework and next a use case scenario using the contract net protocol that demonstrates the added value of the approach.