Buyer agent decision process based on automatic fuzzy rules generation methods

Software Agents can assume the responsibility of finding and negotiating products on behalf of their owners in an electronic marketplace. In such cases, Fuzzy Logic can provide an efficient reasoning mechanism especially for the buyer side. Agents representing buyers can rely on a fuzzy rule base in order to reason for their next action at every round of the interaction process with sellers. In this paper, we describe a model where the buyer builds its fuzzy knowledge base using algorithms for automatic fuzzy rules generation based on data provided by experts and compare a set of such algorithms. Owing to such algorithms, agent developers spend less time and effort for the definition of the underlying rule base. Moreover, the rule base is efficiently created through the use of the dataset indicating the behaviour of the buyer and, thus, representing its line of actions in the electronic marketplace. In our work, we use such algorithms for the definition of the buyer behaviour and we provide critical insides for every algorithm describing their advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, we present numerical results for every basic parameter of the interaction process, such as the time required for the rule base generation, the Joint Utility of the interaction process or the value of the acceptance degree that each algorithm results.