• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.1-25
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• 2006

This research approached the negotiation problem from the seller's perspective in the make-to-order manufacturing industry in order to solve the multi-attribute automated negotiation problem. To this end, more than 'two negotiation attributes are defined and a preferred value of each negotiation alternative is calculated based on the entropy value of each attribute. And then, the best option is selected according to the utility function of each negotiator, a penalty of negotiation delay, and conviction of possibility of negotiation success. The suggested automated negotiation methods in this study can be employed for the development of advanced automated negotiation systems.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.89-96
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• 2005

Though studies on negotiations have actively been conducted in the field of e-Commerce so far, some problems have yet to be solved and many application fields of negotiation systems exist. Currently, many businesses shift from various fields to e-Commerce market, due to recent social changes and expansion of e-Commerce market; however, we need to develop the study of automated agents to resolve the issue of negotiation, which is an essential element in the e-Commerce, by minimizing human interference under the e-Commerce environment. In this study, we intend to propose a new negotiation protocol considering the negotiation alternatives through continuous negotiation rounds in relation to an automated negotiation issue whose participants are one to N (seller to buyers). We also present an agent-facilitated negotiation methodology by which negotiation alternative generation process is automated, in consideration of buyer's negotiation attributes and strategies in the negotiation system.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.308-316
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• 2004

This paper proposed mediator agent system that guarantees reciprocity to attendances in bilateral negotiations for electronic commerce that is different from regular commercial transactions. The optimal agreement was supposed to provide the total maximum profits and the minimum difference in profits of both attendances in negotiations. In the mediator agent system, mediator agent conducted the negotiations considering multi attributes of product and Multi Attribute Utility Theory(MAUT) was applied to evaluate the profits of buyer and seller. 1'he negotiation model in mediator agent system was transformed into linear programming according to the information of bargain for attendances in negotiations. In order to compare with mediator agent system under the same conditions of reciprocity, another negotiation agent system was implemented using trade-off mechanism that is an algorithm for agent interactions in negotiation. The negotiation agent system using trade-off mechanism did not guarantee the optimal agreement, whereas mediator agent system provided attendances in negotiations with optimal agreement rapidly in comparison with trade-off mechanism.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.11D no.3
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• pp.731-740
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• 2004

In this paper we propose a fast negotiation agent system that guarantees the reciprocity of the attendants in a bilateral negotiation on the e-commerce. The proposednegotiation agent system exploits the incremental learning method based on an artificial neural network in generating a counter-offer and is trained by the previous offer that has been rejected by the other party. During a negotiation, the software agents on behalf of a buyer and a seller negotiate each other by considering the multi-attributes of a product. The experimental results show that the proposed negotiation system achieves better agreements than other negotiation agent systems that are operated under the realistic and practical environment. Furthermore, the proposed system carries out negotiations about twenty times faster than the previous negotiation systems on the average.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.28 no.11
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• pp.842-854
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• 2001

Today\`s first generation shopping agent is limited to comparing merchant offerings usually on price instead of their full range of attributes. Even in the full range comparison, there is not a good model which considers the overall features in the negotiation process. Therefore, the negotiation model needs to be extended to include negotiations over the more attributes. In this paper, we propose a negotiation model in the agent-mediated electronic commerce to negotiate over prices, product features, warranties and service policies based on utility theory and simple heuristics. We will describe a prototype agent-mediated electronic commerce framework called Pmart. This framework provides the software reuse and the extensibility based on the object-oriented technology. It is implemented on Windows-based platforms using Java and CORBA for the network transparency and platform independence.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.73-89
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• 2004

Since people have come to access more and more information about products with the proliferation of the Internet, more and more customer-to-customer e-marketplaces are being introduced with rapidly increasing transaction volumes. As the role of customer-to-customer electronic commerce has become increasingly regarded as vital to the economy, much research has delved into developing intelligent agent systems to efficiently support customer-to-customer electronic commerce. Most of this research, however, has focused only on supporting simple negotiation for the price of common goods along the time span. To expand the negotiation object to the differentiated goods, the customer must be allowed to negotiate over multi-at-tributes of the product besides the price, including the attributes related to the transaction activity itself, such as delivery time and payment method. To satisfy this requirement, we propose an agent marketplace for differentiated goods where the agent of a customer can negotiate not only the price but also the various attributes of the product and the transaction in order to achieve a better utility level for both buyer and seller. The formal protocol and the architecture issues to support the proposed e-marketplace and agents are also addressed.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.73-94
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• 2010

The attending system is a medical system that allows doctors in clinics to use the extra equipment in hospitals-beds, laboratory, operating room, etc-for their patient's care under a contract between the doctors and hospitals. Therefore, the system is very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of the usage of medical resources. However, it is necessary to develop a strong support system to strengthen its weaknesses and supplement its merits. If doctors use hospital beds under the attending system of hospitals, they would be able to check a patient's condition often and provide them with nursing care services. However, the current attending system lacks delivery and assistance support. Thus, for the successful performance of the attending system, a networking system should be developed to facilitate communication between the doctors and nurses. In particular, the nursing records in the attending system could help doctors monitor the patient's condition and provision of nursing care services. A nursing record is the formal documentation associated with nursing care. It is merely a data repository that helps nurses to track their activities; nursing records thus represent a resource of primary information that can be reused. In order to maximize their usefulness, nursing records have been introduced as part of computerized patient records. However, nursing records are internal data that are not disclosed by hospitals. Moreover, the lack of standardization of the record list makes it difficult to share nursing records. Under the attending system, nurses would want to minimize the amount of effort they have to put in for the maintenance of additional records. Hence, they would try to maintain the current level of nursing records in the form of record lists and record attributes, while doctors would require more detailed and real-time information about their patients in order to monitor their condition. Therefore, this study developed a system for assisting in the maintenance and sharing of the nursing records under the attending system. In contrast to previous research on the functionality of computer-based nursing records, we have emphasized the practical usefulness of nursing records from the viewpoint of the actual implementation of the attending system. We suggested that nurses could design a nursing record dictionary for their convenience, and that doctors and nurses could confirm the definitions that they looked up in the dictionary through negotiations with intelligent agents. Such an agent-based system could facilitate networking among medical institutes. Multi-agent systems are a widely accepted paradigm for the distribution and sharing of computation workloads in the scientific community. Agent-based systems have been developed with differences in functional cooperation, coordination, and negotiation. To increase such communication, a framework for a multi-agent based system is proposed in this study. The agent-based approach is useful for developing a system that promotes trade-offs between transactions involving multiple attributes. A brief summary of our contributions follows. First, we propose an efficient and accurate utility representation and acquisition mechanism based on a preference scale while minimizing user interactions with the agent. Trade-offs between various transaction attributes can also be easily computed. Second, by providing a multi-attribute negotiation framework based on the attribute utility evaluation mechanism, we allow both the doctors in charge and nurses to negotiate over various transaction attributes in the nursing record lists that are defined by the latter. Third, we have designed the architecture of the nursing record management server and a system of agents that provides support to the doctors and nurses with regard to the framework and mechanisms proposed above. A formal protocol has also been developed to create and control the communication required for negotiations. We verified the realization of the system by developing a web-based prototype. The system was implemented using ASP and IIS5.1.