A Fuzzy Logic Based Intelligent Negotiation Agent (FINA) in Ecommerce

Abstract

With the evolution of electronic commerce (eCommerce) on the Web and the rise of interest in intelligence of software agents, automated negotiation is becoming an increasingly popular method for an eCommerce system to be efficient; however, negotiation, which takes place in transactions, is complicated, time-consuming and costly for participants to reach an agreement. This paper presents a model of an intelligent negotiation agent based on fuzzy logic methodology in order to alleviate the complexity of negotiation. The proposed negotiation agent model is particularly suitable to open environments, such as the Internet. The conventional methods, such as game theory, are incapable of handling an open environment where the information is sparse and full of uncertainty, while the fuzzy approaches are suitable to elegantly deal with this problem. The fuzzy logic based intelligent negotiation agent, presented in this paper, is able to interact autonomously and consequently save human labor in negotiations. The aim of modeling a negotiation agent is to reach mutual agreement efficiently and intelligently. The negotiation agent is able to negotiate with other such agents, over various sets of issues, on behalf of the real-world parties they represent, i.e. it can handle multi-issue negotiation. The reasoning model of the negotiation agent has been implemented partially by using c# based on Microsoft .NET. The reliability and the flexibility of the reasoning model are finally evaluated. The results show that performance of the proposed agent model is acceptable for negotiation parties to achieve mutual benefits