The Research On Modelling Of Agent-Based Electronic Commerce Negotiation Protocol

As their capabilities to imitate the social intelligence of human being more flexibly and adaptively, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) can widely be applied to construct open and dynamic software systems, and are one of the major research areas in artificial intelligence. Designing formal methods to describe the interaction protocols between agents in MAS are one of the most important problems. In this dissertation, based on requirements for modeling the negotiation protocols between agents for electronic commerce systems, a formal method for describing agent interaction protocols based on Petri net is proposed, and applied it to model the major protocols in electronic commerce systems. Basic theoretical properties of this formal method and its applications are approached.The major contributions of this dissertation are as follows:1. To point out the main 3 issues need to be solved and gave out a detail introduction of the existing solutions corresponding to these 3 issues.2. To summarize, classify and compare the major negotiation protocols used in electronic commerce systems according to the 5 criteria.3. To propose a framework to model negotiation protocols, whose attributes including actions, roles, states, rules and messages.4. To propose an extended Petri net as the formal method to represent the negotiation protocols, which support analysis, reuse, and integration.5. To describe three kinds of negotiation protocols between agents in electronic commerce systems and analyze their basic properties.