Designing Agent-Based Negotiation for E-Marketing

This chapter describes how to design agent-based negotiation systems in e-marketing. Such a negotiation scheme requires the construction of a suitable set of rules, called a protocol, among the participating agents. The construction of the protocol is carried out in two stages: first expressing a program into an object-based rule system and then converting the rule applications into a set of agent-based transactions on a database of active objects represented using high-level data structures. We also describe how to detect the termination of the negotiation process based on Commission-Savings-Tally Algorithm. A simple example illustrates how a set of agents can participate in a negotiation protocol to find the shortest travel route on a map of cities represented as a directed weighted graph. INTRODUCTION In Chapter 13, “E-business Transaction Management in Web Integrated Network Environment,” we described the applications of agents in e-business transaction. As described there, agents consist of information objects and an associated script that knows what to do with the information and how to deal with the environment. They behave like actors and have intentions and actions. Agents are autonomous and they have a built in control to act only if they want to. In addition, agents are flexible, proactive, and have multithreaded control. In this chapter, we describe in detail how a set of agents can be used for negotiation in e-marketing. For this purpose we need to have a model of the multi-agent-based paradigm for executing the negotiation process in a manner very similar to what human beings do. An important model of multi-agent paradigm that is suitable for our purpose is from Fisher (1995). This model is applicable to design a concurrent multi-agent negotiation paradigm based on the transactional logic model (Bonner & Kifer, 1994). Although other models of the multi-agent system have also been proposed (Figure1) (Chen & Dayal, 2000; Dignum & Sierra, 2001; Genesereth & Nilsson, 1987; Ishida, 1994), Fisher’s model has the simplicity and adaptability for realization as a distributed transaction-based paradigm for negotiation . This chapter appears in the book, Architectural Issues of Web-Enabled Electronic Business, edited by Shi Nan Si and V.K. Murthy. Copyright © 2003, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com ITB8708 IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING