| Abstract |
E-Commerce describes the revolution that is currently transforming the way business is conducted, through the use of information technology, and in particular the World Wide Web. Brokering and negotiation are fundamental stages of e-Commerce. Over the last years, there has been an increasing interest for the automation of these two stages. This is partially achieved by the use of software agents. As machines start to engage in business processes, information must be organized in such a way that is accessible by both humans and machines. Additionally, machines must be able to access, process and interpret the information in the same way. The Semantic Web vision promises to handle these new issues. Electronic Brokering is a good candidate for taking up Semantic Web technology. We study the matchmaking problem that is, how a requester’s requirements and preferences can be matched against a set of offerings collected by a broker and also check how trustworthy the providers of the offerings are. The proposed solution uses the Semantic Web standard of OWL to represent the offerings, and reactive rules for expressing the requirements and preferences. We also implement a negotiating agent architecture in the multi-agent environment JADE following the FIPA specifications that uses FIPA ACL messages for the communication between agents. The strategy of each agent is affected by various parameters and can change in many different ways from the beginning to the end of the negotiation. Agents also have the ability to detect abnormal bidding behavior during the negotiation process.
This thesis also describes a platform that defines and implements all the basic stages of the overall process of e-trading, facilitating human users in closing deals in an automated manner. The platform is based on a design that integrates three prominent technologies for addressing issues of next generation e-Commerce applications: autonomous intelligent software agents, peer-to-peer networking and the Semantic Web.
The implementation of our approach is demonstrated in the context of auction scenarios. The platform is designed to be highly extensible to allow experimentation with the technologies involved. A thorough evaluation of the system’s performance, under various test cases, is demonstrated showing all the agent’s abilities described above.
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A semantic peer-to-peer marketplace hosting trusted negotiations among intelligent agents
