B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

398 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
industry news, liquidity and current market information and transaction
services.
KASBAH —AN AGENT BASED E-MARKETPLACE
Kasbah is an agent marketplace that allows agents to negotiate the
price of goods on behalf of consumers. However, Kasbah allows
negotiations based only on price and uses only one specific negotiation
strategy.
In the Kasbah system, buyers who need to procure particular
goods would create an agent, give it basic strategic direction and
send it off into the electronic marketplace. The Kasbah agents would
then proactively seek out potential sellers and negotiate with them on
the buyer's behalf, making the best possible deal based on a set of
constraints specified by the buyer, including the highest acceptable
price and a transaction completion date.
The selling agents in the Kasbah system are pro-active too. When
a selling agent is created, the marketplace has to give it a list of
potential buyer agents and inform all potential buyers of the existence
of this new selling agent. It has to match up agents interested in the
same goods.
Using intelligent agents to buy and sell goods can create truly
rational market behavior— just the way economics is supposed to
work. Future exchanges will be built using a set of agents to support
coordination, negotiation and settlement with both numerical data and
textual information. Agents would automate the whole process of
multidimensional B2B e-commerce involving product selection, payment
methods, delivery, after sales service, etc. This is in sharp contrast to
today's B2B e-marketplaces that are purelly transaction based. Such a
multi-agent model would be ideal for highly uncertain and dynamic
markets involving complex negotiation processes. The required conditions
to build such a marketplace are the establishment of ontologies (in
short: unequivocal definitions of entities) and protocols.