Chapter 7: Intelligent Product Brokering and User Preference Tracking

Sheng-Uei Guan, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Chon Seng Ngoo, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Fangming Zhu, National University of Singapore, Singapore

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Abstract

One potential application for agent-based systems has been in the area of m-commerce. In most current systems, user-supplied keywords are normally used to generate a profile for the user. In this chapter, a design for an evolutionary ontology-based product-brokering agent for m-commerce applications is proposed. It uses an evaluation function to represent the user's preference instead of the usual keyword-based profile. By using genetic algorithms, the agent tries to track the user's preferences for a particular product by tuning some parameters inside. A prototype was implemented in Java, and the results obtained from our experiments look promising.