Intelligent agent for supporting construction procurement negotiation

Negotiation is commonly required in the procurement of construction materials for general contractors. However, people often reach suboptimal agreements, thereby "leaving money on the table". As E-commerce is becoming popular, an automated system that could evaluate bids, conduct negotiation to finalize the bid, and value the characteristics of negotiating parties would be useful to both contractor and suppliers. This paper presents an agent-based system that allows negotiating parties to define their preferences of negotiable issues and options, and suggests the most beneficial agreement using the genetic algorithm. Experiments were also conducted to evaluate the system's performance on effectiveness and efficiency.