Towards an Agent-Based Approach for Multimarket Package e-Procurement

While most e-commerce research focuses on one market based problems, less work has been done on mul-timarket aggregation. Nowadays it is important to address the multimarket package e-procurement problem if we want to acquire a combination of goods and services from different suppliers and service providers. To achieve this, one should address the issues pertaining to identifying of a company's needs, discovering poten-tial partners and suppliers, gathering distributed information and conducting combined negotiations, creating a seamless of information flow with different heterogeneous markets, suppliers, and partners, and finally con-cluding transactions. Several commercial e-procurement applications already automate some aspects of the procurement processes, helping decision makers and employees complete their purchasing activity. But none take into account the key aspects of combining goods and services into one aggregated package. Agent-based systems are well equipped to address the challenges of multimarket package e-procurement. Indeed, goal driven autonomous agents aim to satisfy user requirements and preferences while being flexible enough to deal with the diversity of semantics amongst markets, suppliers, service providers, partners and individual sellers. A dis-tributed common shared space, called infospace, comprised of the negotiation exchanges and states, allows for agent coordination, market aggregation, and packages construction. This paper presents some issues and chal-lenges faced in multimarket package e-procurement, and puts forward an agent-based approach to deal with them.

, 2002