Knowledge representation for multi-agent negotiations in virtual enterprises

A virtual enterprise (VE) involves the coordination of collaborative partners in the supply chain network. To seek the market opportunity, the VE initiator and the VE partners have to negotiate with each other to achieve mutual gains as well as ultimate customer satisfaction. Messages sent and received by the counterparts during the negotiation process are considered as negotiation knowledge. However, it is difficult for different companies involved in the VE to recognise the heterogeneous knowledge on their own, especially in an agent-based negotiation system. Thus, semantic interoperability is an important issue in a VE. The objective of this research is to propose an ontology-based knowledge representation approach to provide a semantic interoperable environment to realise automatic negotiations in the VE. The contribution of this article is twofold. On the one hand, an ontology-based knowledge representation scheme is established for VE partners' ontology construction, matching and integration. On the other hand, two agent interaction protocols are developed for the multi-agent system (MAS) to retrieve semantic correspondences and conduct bid negotiations.