Keywords:

Abstract:

Negotiation events in industrial procurement involving multiple, highly
customisable goods pose serious challenges to buying agents when trying
to determine the best set of providing agents’ offers. Typically, a
buying agent's decision involves a large variety of constraints that
may involve attributes of a very same item as well as attributes of
different, multiple items. In this paper we present iBundler,
an agent-aware service offered to buying agents to help them determine
the optimal bundle of received offers based on their business rules. In
this way, buying agents are relieved with the burden of solving too
hard a problem and concentrate on strategic issues. iBundler is
intended as a negotiation service for buying agents and as a winner
determination service for reverse combinatorial auctions with side
constraints. Furthermore, we assess the computational cost added by
employing agent technology in the development of iBundler to characterise the type of negotiation scenarios that it can acceptably handle.

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