Fuzzy e-negotiation agents

 The paper presents a prototype of Fuzzy e-Negotiation Agents (FeNAs) for autonomous multi-issue negotiation in e-commerce. It considers negotiation as a form of distributed decision making in the presence of limited common knowledge and imprecise/soft constraints that can be modeled as a distributed fuzzy constraint satisfaction problem (DFCSP). FeNAs incorporate the principles of utility theory within DFCSPs and use fuzzy constraint-based reasoning in order to find a consensus that maximizes the agent's utility and the level of its fuzzy constraint satisfaction subject to its acceptability by other agents. The paper presents aspects of problem representation and negotiation mechanisms used by FeNAs in the context of DFCSPs. An overview of FeNAs is provided and some capabilities for automated multi-issue negotiation are illustrated with two scenarios of e-commerce trading.