Intelligent agent based competitive contract process in electronic commerce

Abstract

In the Internet based electronic commerce, more benefits can be provided to both of buyers and sellers than traditional markets in the real world. However, such convenience will push up the number of transactions astronomically, resulting in the manual handling of transactions uneconomical or physical impossible. So we need to automate the product search, selection, and contract process as much as possible using intelligent buyer and seller agents to reduce the degree of human``s effort. In this research, we suggest an infrastructure for automation of competitive contract process in agent based commerce on the Internet. A competitive contract is one of commerce type which involves multiple sellers and one buyer as like bids or multiple buyers and one seller as like auctions. A competitive contract process should include announcing bid or auction, bidding of buyers or sellers and selection of a successful bidder, which are so costly and require a lot of time. For automation of competitive contract process, first we propose a grammar for identifying contract types in a formal way, which can represent new contract types in electronic commerce as well as traditional ones. Second, we suggest a message standard which consist of three layers-Agent Communication Language(ACL)layer, Electronic Commerce(EC)layer, and Product Specification(PS)layer-for a protocol of communication in agent based commerce. Third, an architecture of an intelligent agent named UNIK-AGENT for agent based commerce is suggested. This architecture which consists of Problem Solver and Communication Controller is to process the contract types and messages which are described above automatically based on rule-based system. Fourth, we develop a prototype for agent based commerce by UNIK-AGENT with construction of the knowledge base for activating UNIK-AGENT in bid type contract process. It covers the contract type of an illustrated example in this research.