A knowledge-based framework for complex, proactive and service-oriented e-negotiation systems

Abstract

Advances in information technology and knowledge management change the way that e-negotiations, which constitute an important aspect of worldwide etrading, can be structured and represented. In this paper, a novel approach that focuses on knowledge modeling, formalization, representation and management in the domain of e-negotiation is described. The proposed approach exploits Ontologies, Service Oriented Architectures, Semantic Web Services, software agent platforms, and Knowledge-Bases to construct a framework that favors dynamically adapted negotiation protocols, negotiation process visualization and management, modeling and preference elicitation of the negotiated object and automatic deployment of negotiation interfaces. Negotiation process, protocol and strategy are examined, and a hybrid approach that integrates rules and workflow diagrams to describe and represent them is introduced.

Supply chain knowledge management supported by a simple knowledge organization system

“…Some of them include ontologies and semantic Web services (Koumoutsos and Thramboulidis 2009), software agents (Sun et al 2012), case-based systems (Luu et al 2003), and electronic agents (Hadikusumo et al 2005). One of the most used is software agents (Lee et al 2009).…”

Reward and Penalty Functions in Automated Negotiation

“…We assume A 2 would be 100% happy if anybody could pay them $7000 for this service. Thus, A 2 's utility of accepting the offer, denoted as o, can be defined as u(o) = 5000 7000 = 0.71; (25) whereas A 2 's utility of denying o is u(¬o) = 6000 7000 = 0.86,…”

“…1,3 For example, in service-oriented environments, if the service requested by a service consumer cannot be fulfilled by the service provider, they need to negotiate their service request and offers. [25][26][27] Moreover, automated negotiation can significantly reduce negotiation time and cost (making large volumes of transactions possible in a short period of time without physically meeting in the same place) and also can remove some of the reticence of humans to engage in negotiation (e.g., because of embarrassment or personality) 3,28 and make the negotiation outcomes more trustable by humans. 29 In human negotiation, when one side's offer is rejected by the other side, the side can use a certain reward or/and penalty to change the mind of the other and so increase the chance of reaching an agreement between them.…”

Bridging Service-Oriented Architecture and IEC 61499 for Flexibility and Interoperability

“…There are several existing approaches to dynamic reconfiguration based on the IEC 61499 standard. A concept of an engineering support environment based on SOA for dynamically reconfiguring IEC 61499 systems is proposed by Thramboulidis et al [15]. However, it seems to be limited only to the design level as no detail on a service-oriented runtime environment is given.…”