CARDS: Case-Based Reasoning Decision Support Mechanism for Multi-Agent Negotiation in Mobile Commerce

Recent advent of mobile commerce or m-commerce suggests a need to incorporate intelligent techniques capable of providing decision support consistent with past instances as well as coordination support for conflicting goals and preferences among mobile users. Since m-commerce allows users to move around while doing business transactions, it seems imperative for the m-commerce users to be given high quality of decision support which should be timely and consistent with past instances. For this purpose, this paper presents two schemes (1) both buyers and sellers engaged in m-commerce are represented by B-agents and S-agents so that the multi-agent framework can be applied, and (2) a case-based reasoning decision support (CARDS) mechanism is developed to provide a robust and consistent support for negotiation among the multi-agents. The primary mission of CARDS here is to match buyers and sellers all of whom want to maximize their own utilities. A real example of m-commerce was chosen to verify the validity of the proposed CARDS, in which perishable products should be sold to those buyers on time. Experiments were performed on the Netlogo, a multi-agent simulation platform running on Windows XP. Statistical tests were also conducted to see whether the experimental results are statistically valid.