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.