Automated Negotiation and Semantic Brokering with Intelligent Agents Using Defeasible Logic

E-Commerce describes the revolution that is currently transforming the way business is conducted, through the use of information technology, and in particular the World Wide Web. Brokering and negotiation are fundamental stages of e-Commerce. The last few years, there has been an increasing interest for the automation of these two stages. This is partially achieved by the use of software agents. As machines start to engage in business processes, information must be organized in such a way that is accessible by both humans and machines. Additionally, machines must be able to access, process and interpret the information in the same way. Semantic Web vision promises to handle these new issues. Electronic Brokering is a good candidate for taking up Semantic Web technology. We study the brokering or matchmaking problem that is, how a requester’s requirements and preferences can be matched against a set of offerings collected by a broker. The proposed solution uses the Semantic Web standard of RDF to represent the offerings, and defeasible logic, which is based on non-monotonic reasoning, for expressing the requirements and preferences. We motivate and explain the approach we propose, and report on a prototypical implementation of a semantic brokering system, exhibiting the described functionality, in JADE multi-agent environment. Expression of negotiation strategies is also of great importance in e-Commerce procedure. We exploit the use of defeasible logic for expressing negotiation strategies. We also implement a negotiating logicbased agent architecture in JADE multi-agent environment.