Implementing Rule-Based Automated Price Negotiation in an Agent System

Costin Bădică (University of Craiova, Romania)

Maria Ganzha (Polish Academy of Science Warsaw, Poland)

Marcin Paprzycki (Polish Academy of Science Warsaw, Poland)

Abstract: The idea of automating e-commerce transactions attracts a lot of interest among researchers and IT practitioners, and multi-agent systems are claimed to be one of promising software technologies for achieving this goal. Since price negotiations are one of crucial aspects of e-commerce transactions, in this paper we present a rule-based implementation of automated price negotiations utilized in a multi-agent system that models an e-commerce environment. We start by summarizing state-of-the-art in rule-based approaches to automated negotiations. We follow with a brief description of the conceptual architecture of our system and a simplified scenario that involves multiple buyer agents participating in multiple English auctions performed in parallel. A detailed discussion of the design and implementation of price negotiations, using JADE and JESS, and presentation of sample experiments complete the paper.

Keywords: electronic commerce transaction, multiagent system, rule-based representation

Categories: I.2.11, I.2.4, K.4.4