Category Archives: EC & FinTech Business Model

최형림, 김현수, 박영재, 박병주, 이경전, “인터넷상의 가상생산 기반 부품판매 에이전트 개발”, 경영정보학연구, 12(4):193-213, 2002. (PDF) in Korean

ABSTRACT

The sales activity of most of small manufacturing companies is based on orders of buyers. The process of promotion, negotiation, receipt and selection of orders of the manufacturers is closely coupled with the load status of the production lines. The decision on whether to accept an order or not, or the selection of optimal order set among excessive orders is entirely dependent on the schedule of production lines. However, in the real world, since the production scheduling activity is mainly performed by human experts, most of small manufacturers are suffer from being unable to meet due dates, lack of rapid decision on the acceptance of new order. Recently, Internet based Electronic Commerce is recognized as one of the alternatives for strengthening sales power of small and medium companies. However, small and medium manufacturers can’t adjust properly to the new environment because they are in short of money, personnel, and technology. To cope with this problem, this paper deals with development of part sales agent coupled with virtual manufacturing in Internet environment that consist of selection agent, advertisement agent, selection agent, negotiation agent, and virtual manufacturing system. This paper develops a time-bounded negotiation mechanism for small and medium manufacturers in agent-based automated negotiation between customers and negotiation agents. Furthermore, to select optimal order set maximized profit, we first formulate the order selection problem with mixed integer programming, but the computation time of IP is not acceptable for real world scale problem. To overcome this problem and dynamic nature of virtual manufacturing, we suggest a genetic algorithm approach, which shows a reasonable computation time for real world case and good incremental problem solving capability.

이경전, 장용식, 최형림, 김현수, 박영재, 박병주, “복잡한 의사결정과 협상 환경을 위한 에이전트 기반 시스템: 가상생산 응용”, Information Systems Review, 4(2):223-236, 2002. (PDF) in Korean

ABSTRACT

In an agent-based system, each agent has its own decision making capability and competes, cooperates, and communicates each other with an agent interface. Virtual manufacturing has characteristics as a typical application area of agent-based system: complex and time-bound decision making and negotiation. The time-boundness influences the choice of decision making models and design of protocols for internal and external negotiation. In this paper, we provide a case study which suggests a time-bound framework for external and internal negotiation between the agents for virtual manufacturing environment. We illustrate decision making model selection strategy and the system architecture of the agent-based system for the complex and time-bound environment.

Lee, S. K., Lee, J. K. K. J. Lee, “Customized Purchase Supporting Expert System: UNIK-SES”, Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 11, no. 4, pp.431-441, 1996.pdf

Abstract

An expert system that assists the customized men’s wear purchasing process is developed. In the past, configuration systems have adopted either a rule- or a constraint-based representation. To overcome the limitation of the representation, an integrated representation of the Constraint and Rule Satisfaction Problems (CRSP) is adopted. Since the general purpose tool UNIK-CRSP provides concurrent, integrated and interactive reasoning, UNIK-CRSP is very suitable for assisting the personalized customer product configuration process in a natural manner. Using UNIK-CRSP, the domain-specific tool UNIK-SES is developed with the additional features of candidate products selection and user interfaces. This approach should be useful for customer support in electronic marketing on the information superhighway.

Lee, K. J., Chang, Y. S., Lee, J. K., “Time-Bounded Negotiation Framework for Electronic Commerce Agents”, Decision Support Systems, vol. 28, no.4, pp. 319-331, June, 2000.pdf

Abstract

For efficient and informative coordination of agents especially in electronic commerce environment, a time-bound agent negotiation framework is proposed utilizing a time-based commitment scheme. By attaching commitment duration to agent messages, the traditional contract net protocol is extended to a time-bound negotiation framework TBNF. The proposed negotiation framework has a new message type which allows for parties to agree upon the extension of commitment duration, and a novel commitment concept in the form of negative commitment. The semantics of the messages with the commitment duration are interpreted, and then the three typical negotiation protocols are formally defined and compared — nothing-guaranteed protocol, acceptance-guaranteed protocol, and finite-time guarantee protocol — which can be incorporated into TBNF. The TBNF should provide a background for efficient and effective electronic commerce negotiation while accommodating each agent’s adaptive negotiation strategy.

Key Word

Communication protocols; Multi-agent negotiation; Electronic commerce; Contract Net Protocol; Multi-agent coordination