Enacting agent-based services for automated procurement

Negotiation events in industrial procurement involving multiple, highly customisable goods pose serious challenges to buying agents when trying to determine the best set of providing agents' offers. Typically, a buying agent's decision involves a large variety of constraints that may involve attributes of a very same item as well as attributes of different, multiple items. In this paper we present iBundler, an agent-aware service offered to buying agents to help them determine the optimal bundle of received offers based on their business rules. In this way, buying agents are relieved with the burden of solving too hard a problem and concentrate on strategic issues. iBundler is intended as a negotiation service for buying agents and as a winner determination service for reverse combinatorial auctions with side constraints. Furthermore, we assess the computational cost added by employing agent technology in the development of iBundler to characterise the type of negotiation scenarios that it can acceptably handle.