Research And Design Of Agent-based Negotiation System In E-Business Environment

Along with the fast development of computer and network technologies, Business activities through networks are becoming more and more popular. E-business took full advantage of the power of internet, which shorten the distance between companies and customers to zero, and this zero-distance trading brought companies infinite business opportunities.The success or failure of E-Business seriously depends on business negotiations. Negotiation is a matter that needs many resources such as persons, money and time. In order to save the time of both merchants and customers, improve trade efficiency and reduce trade cost, it is necessary to realize automatic negotiations or half-automatic negotiations during the electronic trade. Agent has the features of autonomic, mobile and flexible, which is useful to give a best trade solution during the negotiation between seller and buyer. Therefore, this thesis gives an Agent-based electronic trade framework, and discusses partial process of B2C E-Business activities about negotiations including user searching products, negotiations, trades and the management of product information. In stead of persons, agents act as traders in our framework, which forms a new commerce mode consisting of a multi-agents buyer system and a multi-agents seller system.Because negotiation itself is also a wide research field, this thesis designed and implemented a negotiation model under the preconditions of agent-based product trade.The 1~st chapter summarized the research background of this thesis, analyzed the sense and necessity of the research, introduced the status of present research, discussed the existing problems in present research and the main contents and structure of this thesis.The 2~nd chapter introduced the relative background knowledge in detail. The knowledge includes E-Business technologies, agent technologies and mobile agent technologies. These background technologies are the basic knowledge of this thesis.The 3~rd chapter put forward the agent-based negotiation model. The content of this chapter is the key point and the difficult point of the whole thesis. There are many theories and methods of negotiation which are mainly game-based and heuristic-based negotiation and not perfect. This thesis focuses on the problems about two-sides multi-projects negotiations which is based on intention. The thesis gave the corresponding negotiation model, negotiation protocol, negotiation algorithm, negotiation process and so on.The 4~th chapter put forward the architecture of agent-based negotiation system. It is the key chapter. This chapter gave the new trade model consisting of seller multi-agent system and buyer multi-agent system instead of persons, and discussed partial process of B2C E-Business activities about negotiations including registry, negotiations, trades, etc.The 5~th chapter introduced the implementation of the agent-based negotiation prototype system including the runtime environment of the system, UML diagrams of the system and some interfaces of the system.The 6~th chapter summarized the main research results, the innovation points of this thesis, and indicated the future work.