Combining Ontology with Intelligent Agent to Provide Negotiation Service

1.1 Negotiation Service

According with the relevant discussion of MAS, a separate agent generally is able to complete a simple task through the implementation of a simple activity. Federal agent can use one of a special agent to implement a complex activity (Agent collaboration by other members) to achieve a relatively complex task. In this paper, we abstract this method which put a single agent or federal agent to finish the mission as a service.

Service refers to an entity (individual or business) that can finish a mission, this mission not only can be executed by agent owned by entities, but also achieve through the general processes (such as production) and can be provided to another entity through negotiation.

A service consists of three elements: service provider, service demand and service implementation (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Three elements of service

Service demand side: it need other agent to assist the implementation of an event and look for provide services (the implementation of this activity) of the agent. It can send task to the agent which has the capacity to provide the service.

• Service provider: it has ability to perform certain activities (services).

• Service implementation: it executes a (simple or complex) by the agent or provided through the general processes (such as production, sales).

In this paper, we put forward the negotiation framework which consists of three parts: buyer, seller, negotiation server.

• Seller (Service provider): It will be able to provide products or services information related to negotiation and publishes it to the negotiation server.

• Buyer (Service demand): It search negotiation server to get product or service information.

• Negotiation server (Service implementation): It is a platform to provide various negotiation approaches.

1.2 Process of Negotiation Server

Our environment acts as a distributed marketplace that e-shops and allows buyer and seller to visit them and purchase products in semantic network. We provide semantic web service interface to interact with negotiation server. Agent can visit interface and get negotiation mechanism from server. The detailed design of negotiation server as shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2.

Process of negotiation service

Let us now describe each part of the system in upper figure and their respective functionalities.

• Seller: In the process of negotiation, he is to provide products and services side. Find a suitable buyer, the seller must be able to carry out negotiation, therefore, the buyer and the seller is a necessary condition in negotiation.

• Buyer: he wants the buyer will receive the product or service. At the same time through negotiation, he can be the initiator of negotiation, the addresser of negotiation.

• Negotiation server: it contains different types of negotiation approach to meet the needs of different users of the negotiation, at the same time, it is also provide semantic interface to exchange information especially in negotiation protocol.