ISBN: 978-972-8924-66-9 © 2008 IADIS

AN AUTONOMOUS DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

PROTOTYPE FOR SUPLY MANAGEMENT IN
E-COMMERCE SYSTEMS

Bahar Gelmez, Mustafa Sancar, Guray Yilmaz, Akhan Akbulut

Department of Computer Engineering
Istanbul Kultur University
Bakirkoy, 34510, Istanbul, TURKEY

ABSTRACT
The aim of this work is to reduce the supply management problems of e-Commerce systems and to offer an autonomous
decision support system prototype. For this kind of architecture, operating intelligent agents that use data mining
algorithms is recommended. Agents, check the past selling data, forecast which products to be in stock and how much of
which product to be sold in further purchases and tell the amount of the product to be purchased to the system
administrator (manager). In the same way, agents take part actively in product and client management.

KEYWORDS
e-Commerce Systems, Intelligent Agents, Data Mining

1. INTRODUCTION
When the sizes of e-Commerce systems grow bigger, managerial functions getting difficult is an expected
situation. In order to perform these managerial functions and to carry out the operations free of problem, we
must benefit from autonomous systems. In our first study (Akbulut A., Yilmaz G., 2007), agents are used to
implement the content management for a big e-Mall and the duties which are performed by human are
transferred to these intelligent systems. Such as to continuity to that work, agents are used alike to fulfill
different managerial processes.

2. BACKGROUND
Nowadays E-commerce site users are increasing rapidly. However manually controlling the accounts,
products, orders etc. get difficult. Thus, Agents step in to do some operations automatically in e-commerce
environment (Hutter D., at all, 2007), (Lau R.Y.K., Li Y., Song D., Kwok R.C.W., 2008).
In shopping sites “Consumer to business” commerce type is rarely used by users in web because of the
high transaction costs (Chen D., Jeng B., Lee W., Chuang C.,2008). So that the agents work to combine
needs and preferences of the buyers in a common decision, how the communication will be among the buyers
in a group and how the buyers interact with the sellers in web. So people can benefit from an easy collective
purchasing system in a grouping behavior. This called Buyer Collective Purchasing (BCP). Negotiation part
which is in E-commerce is usually done manually, but it’s too hard to handle so now agents are also used in
this area. The agents that work on negotiation use a novel knowledge discovery method and a probabilistic
negotiation decision making mechanism to become better the performance. Agents use their recorded history
files to improve negotiation performance too. Consequently, using of agents makes better the website life to
deal with the lamenesses and problems in e-commerce environment by putting forward the user satisfaction

326
 IADIS International Conference e-Commerce 2008

3. PROPOSED AUTONOMOUS DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

The structure of our e-commerce system is directed by firewalls. Visitors and customers are transferred to an
available web server where the load is not heavy. Web services connect to the database at SQL 2005 server
and reply to users. There also exists Agent Server that makes detailed processes and keeps the agents inside.
The Agent Server where the Windows Server 2003 operating system is installed contains the JADE
(Bellifemine F.L., Caire G., Greenwood D., 2007) framework. This architecture is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The Physical Structure of the System

As illustrated in Figure 2, the first agent of the system is Stock Controller Agent (SCA). This agent checks
the amount of products in stock. When the amount of products is reduced, it alerts the Mail Sender Agent
(MSA) to send mail to product supplier. Informer Agent (IA) uses the MSA to send email the new and
featured products to the customer. Category Identifier Agent (CIA) contains a lot of agents to designate
category of products (Akbulut A., Yilmaz G., 2007). Another agent which is related to customers’ shopping
carts and personal information called Customer Profiler Agent (CPA). CPA clusters the customers according
to their orders and profile. The last agent is Database Maintainer Agent (DMA) that maintains database. In
the following, we explain briefly intelligent agents in our system:
Stock Controller Agent: SCA decides reducing of product amount degree by observing the stock of
inventory system. If stock decreases below threshold value, SCA interact with the MSA to buy new products.
Informer Agent: When the new products are entered or featured products are newly specified in the
system, IA informs the customers who tend to buy these products because of the changes or newness.
Although informer agent works on this process, it interacts with the MSA for sending email to the customers.
Mail Sender Agent: MSA sends other agents’ emails to the appropriate system users. For instance, when
SCA or IA makes contact with MSA, MSA creates e-mail that includes information sent by them.
Category Identifier Agent: CIA categorizes the products which are newly entered in to the database.
CIA use hashing techniques and clustering methods to find products categories.

327
ISBN: 978-972-8924-66-9 © 2008 IADIS

Figure 2. Multi-agent Framework’s Infrastructure

Customer Profiler Agent: CPA decides the profiles of customer by looking at the past. Customers can
be grouped (clustered) by CPAs. Thus, more accurate and relevant offers that are related to the shopping,
discount, advertisements can be send to the customers.
Database Maintainer Agent: DMA restores the database by cleaning up the waste data and repairing the
corrupted data in database by observing the system. DMA generally searches main and sub categories which
are not be used in database. Then, it cleans them up from database.

4. CONCLUSION
In this study, we developed an e-commerce platform using intelligent agents. During the development phase,
we focused on agents. Agents which are in our project realizes many processes for different user roles; such
as administration part is the most important one. The intelligent agents which are working in administration
processes are used in determining the purchase amount of product to the stock. However, all announcements
and news are published by agents periodically. Identifying the customer profile is another process handled by
our system for assigning the best discounts to the member customers. AI supported intelligent agents uses the
data mining algorithms to forecast the purchase strategy in amount of products using regression algorithm.
Regression algorithm is for the modeling and analysis of numerical data defines future amount of product
that will be entered, consisting of amount of purchasing product that were in the past. Finally all database
maintenance is applied by an agent to increase the data consistency in e-Commerce system.

REFERENCES
Bellifemine F.L., Caire G., Greenwood D., 2007, Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE, Publisher Wiley
Chen D., Jeng B., Lee W., Chuang C.,2008, Expert Systems with Applications 34, An agent-based model for consumer-
to-business electronic commerce, pp 469–481.
Lau R.Y.K., Li Y., Song D., Kwok R.C.W., 2008, Decision Support Systems 45, Knowledge discovery for adaptive
negotiation agents in e-marketplaces, pp 310-323
Akbulut A., Yilmaz G., 2007, IADIS e-Commerce 2007, An Architectural Model for Content Management in
e-Commerce Applications, Algarve, Portugal, pp. 260-264
Hutter D., Mantel H., Schaefer I., Schairer A., 2007, Journal of Applied Logic 5, Security of multi-agent systems: A case
study on comparison shopping, pp 303–332.

328