An Ontology-based Intelligent System with Ahp to Support Supplier Selection

Due to the popularity of Internet and growing business-to-consumer electronic commerce, the alternative products or services whose information can be acquired through the webs also significantly increased. In this paper, an intelligent agent system, which was initially designed and implemented for the specific application of supplier selection, is proposed to act for consumers in the matters of gathering information of expected suppliers and making an optimal choice from these suppliers. This agent system is composed of two subsystems, product gatherer and decision maker, to address the two key issues, finding out right products and making a right choice. First, Web Ontology Language (OWL) is utilized to define the ontology, which is used for processing the semantic content of gathered supplier’s information. Decision maker subsystem utilized the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is a structured technique for dealing with complex decisions, to make an optimal decision to contribute to the improvement of consumeroriented e-commerce services.