A Fuzzy Description Logic Approach to Bilateral Matchmaking in Electronic Marketplaces

We present a novel Fuzzy Description Logic (DL) based approach to automate matchmaking in e-marketplaces. We model traders’ preferences with the aid of Fuzzy DLs and, given a request, use utility values computed w.r.t. Pareto agreements to rank a set of offers. In particular, we introduce an expressive Fuzzy DL, extended with concrete domains in order to handle numerical, as well as non numerical features, and to deal with vagueness in buyer/seller preferences. Hence, agents can express preferences as e.g., I am searching for a passenger car costing about 22000e yet if the car has a GPS system and more than two-year warranty I can spend up to 25000e. Noteworthy our matchmaking approach, among all the possible matches, chooses the mutually beneficial ones.