Development And Research Of Agent-based Merchandise Management System

Merchandise management-selecting desirable merchandise, disposing ofslow-selling goods and distributing them for the most profit-is important to a retailer'ssuccess because merchandise is the basis of retailing. Particularly because in anElectronic Commerce environment, customer preferences are very diverse and theirmerchant loyalty level is very low, companies should acknowledge the changes incustomer demand patterns quickly and respond to them appropriately. However, untilnow, most retailers have depended on humans for merchandise management. Becausethere are too many merchandise and brands, it is important for merchandise managersto evaluate, compare, select and dispose of merchandise effectively. In this paper, wehave mainly completed the following tasks: We carried on analysis and study, including the evaluation of merchandise,merchandise selection, seasons prediction and purchase schedules building etc. inthe field of retail merchandise management under the EC environment. Making the best of the characteristic of the intelligent Agent, we propose anagent-based system for merchandise management, which performs the functionsautonomously in the merchandise management system by the intelligent Agent.The proposed system will perform merchandise management autonomously andcontinuously in place of a human merchandise management. On the basis of studying an open source agent development platform-JADE, wemade the best use of the functions and characteristics it offered, and developed anagent-based merchandise management system on the platform. In order tofacilitate the agent's intelligent behavior, several analysis tools such as DataEnvelopment Analysis (DEA), Genetic Algorithm (GA) are incorporated into thesystem. The proposed system would accomplish merchandise management timely,autonomously and efficiently, and the merchandise management would reduce theinventory level while increasing sales and profits.On the basis of the research mentioned above, we developed a merchandisemanagement system, which was made up of three Agents and a piece of module. Thesystem has the characteristics of distributed, intelligent and flexible structure. Thispaper has carried on the significant research on the application of intelligent Agentstructure in the business system, and has layed the basis for intelligent corporationinformation system development.