Negotiation by Software Agents in Electronic Business

Electronic negotiation is one of many applications that software agents can perform to facilitate electronic business. Negotiations between software agents and humans (hybrid negotiation), can make electronic business efficient and intelligent. It can save time, effort and other valueable resources by replacing the human in electronic business activities and many other domains. However, to enable hybrid negotiation, a software agent needs clear machine interpretable semantics to understand and generate natural language content. Although it is not simple to make natural language content understandable by software agents as a whole, it can be achieved in different domains--in this case electronic business. For this purpose, an example of hybrid negotiation is presented, in which a software agent and a human agent negotiate for a business contract. Problems involved in this negotiation process are partially resolved through ontologies (the main Semantic Web technology), NSS (negotiation support system) and hand written rules.