Automated Services for Market - Based E - Commerce Transactions

Business transactions focus on the delivery of goods and services from one business partner to another. IT-based services support these transaction activities between suppliers and customers. Usually the transaction process consists of three phases-the information phase, the negotiation phase and the settlement or fulfillment phase. Within the negotiation phase one vital and challenging task is to come to a contract. This is especially true if you apply market mechanisms, i. e. addressing and negotiating with many potential partners. Managing flexible transactions with varying market partners, considering multidimensional terms and conditions, and acting within short periods of time are crucial challenges for automated negotiation services on electronic markets. After introducing a real-time market scenario the approach of intelligent software agents providing automated services is presented. Aspects on negotiation protocols and implementation are outlined. Insights into sample experiments and results are given. Many businesses rely on products or services obtained from different suppliers. In order to keep a business system adaptive, e.g. to changing customer requirements, lean procurement procedures must be installed. Just-in-time procurement is a salient example. Switching suppliers includes analyzing the market, selecting a supplier based on a set of criteria, negotiating terms and conditions, signing a new contract, and fulfilling the transaction. Real-time business applies techniques for automating the time and money consuming process of managing flexible transactions between suppliers and consumers. Many transactions are heavily time dependent, i.e. quantity and quality of transaction objects are changing within short periods of time. Examples are food or flowers, bandwiths of communication services, capacities of transport services or short term energy supply. The market platform introduced in this paper provides automated transaction services to consumers and providers, thereby enabling them to trade in real-time. II. MARKET SCENARIO An electronic market supports the management of transactions between supply and demand by information and communication systems. Negotiating contracts is the central task of market transaction management. So, negotiating a contract is the focal transaction service among the transaction services a market platform offers to vendors and buyers. Often not only price but also other product or service parameters have to be agreed on. This is a big challenge for " intelligent " automated negotiation procedures. Here, an agent-based approach to transaction automation in real-time scenarios is introduced. Fig. 1 shows an example of a real-time market scenario using knowledge based negotiating software agents. The real-time market platform comprises transaction services for different tasks. …