Negotiation paradigms for e-commerce agents using knowledge beads methodology

Abstract

The technology of using computer Agents for B2B trading in Cyberworld is getting prevalent nowadays. Much of the research work has been done on the models, architectures and service provision in the past. However, agent negotiation remains as a challenge in making the whole trading process fully automated, due to its fuzzy and complex nature. The lack of interoperability and knowledge-reuse that limits to case-based, pose certain drawback. An object-oriented ontology-based Knowledge Bead (KB) method for knowledge representation has been proposed (S. Fong et al., 2002). It was designed as a foundation to enable agent negotiation in e-trading environment in a systematic way. This paper continues the research work of KB on formulating its theorems and methodology. Some typical negotiation paradigms using appropriate strategies based on the KB's methodology are presented as well. In particular, KB's taxonomies and their use in the whole negotiation process are discussed. The main advantage of this approach is the ability to describe the deal that is under negotiation in an object-oriented format which in turn allows reasoning, optimizing, knowledge reuse and management.