Research Of Negotiation In Multi-Agent System And Application In E-Commerce

As the popularizing of Internet, electronic markets are becoming one of the major paradigms to carry out business transactions. Compared with traditional markets, electronic markets are information-intensive with much larger information capacity, higher information processing speed, and shorter information life cycle. However, a person usually has rather limited capability to process information with relatively low speed and much less amount. As a result, it has become necessary today to enhance or substitute people's capability in the whole commercial process. Negotiation in Multi-Agent System provides an effective approach to this goal.There are two main requires for the research of negotiation. One is to provide decision support by the analysis of environment. Another is to realize automated negotiation substituting the role of customer's decision. For both of these are base on the selection of negotiation strategies and the management of the negotiation process, this paper is discussed as following.Game theory is the basis of negotiation. Based on the research of game theory, we discuss the model of bargaining, which help us to build the agent-based automated negotiation model in e-commerce.Agent-mediated electronic commerce application must overcome the multi-agent negotiation. We offer the formal description of negotiation protocol, negotiation strategies and the decision model for negotiation. For enhance the efficiency of decision, it is necessary to provide support to the management of the negotiation model. We propose a model management framework for the flexible configuration in negotiation.Multi-agent negotiation discussed in this research can be applied to many dynamic and distributed application fields including agent-based virtual market.