Title: An agent-based electronic market simulator enhanced with ontology matching services and emergent social networks

Authors: Virgínia Nascimento; Maria João Viamonte; Alda Canito; Nuno Silva

Addresses: GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Research Center, Institute of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP/IPP), R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, P-4200-072 Porto, Portugal ' GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Research Center, Institute of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP/IPP), R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, P-4200-072 Porto, Portugal ' GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Research Center, Institute of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP/IPP), R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, P-4200-072 Porto, Portugal ' GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Research Center, Institute of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP/IPP), R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, P-4200-072 Porto, Portugal

Abstract: AEMOS is a simulator which aims to support the development of agent-based electronic markets capable of dealing with the natural semantic heterogeneity existent in this kind of environment. AEMOS simulates a marketplace which provides ontology matching services, enhanced with the exploitation of emergent social networks, enabling an efficient and transparent communication between agents, even when they use different ontologies. The system recommends possible alignments between the agents' ontologies, and lets them negotiate and decide which alignment should be used to translate the exchanged messages. In this paper we propose a new ontology alignment negotiation process, which promotes the reutilisation and combination of already existing alignments, as well as the involvement of business agents in the alignment composition process. With this new model, we aim to achieve a higher adequacy of the used alignments, as well as a more accurate and trustful evaluation of the alignments.

Keywords: agent mediated e-commerce; AMEC; semantic interoperability; ontology alignment negotiation; agent-based simulation; ontology alignment evaluation; emergent social networks; social network-based recommendations; recommender systems; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; MAS; electronic commerce; ontology matching.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2015.071376

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2015 Vol.10 No.3, pp.265 - 278

Received: 24 Feb 2014
Accepted: 03 Jun 2014
Published online: 22 Aug 2015 *

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