Dynamic Matching o0f Supply and Demand in an M-Commerce Services Marketplace: Using Intelligent Agents and Semantic Technology

Abstract

Mobile users desire customized bundles of services that need to be dynamically created from the service providers. However, services are unique and since unused services do not generate revenues they present a lost ‘economic rent’ for organizations that are not part of the network of service providers and, as a result, not a part of the customised bundle of services. The dynamic discovery of a bundle of individual services from such a network that meets the unique needs and constraints of the mobile user requires intelligent agent technology. Such agent technology would match personal needs of the user with the available services in a cost-efficient manner. This chapter provides a mechanism to create dynamic service bundles from ad-hoc user requirements using intelligent agents. The authors apply this technique to a mobile commerce environment and illustrate the composition of user-specific service “bundles” by intelligent agents that represent the interests of the m-commerce user. Such agent-based architectures provide users customized solution ‘bundles’ that reduce their cognitive burden, while improving the utilization of resources for organization that are part of the service provider network.