USC/ISI DEALMAKER Project Publication

AAAI99 Workshop on AI in Electronic Commerce
(AIEC99)

Paper Title, Authors, and Affiliation

Controlling Supplier Selection in an Automated Purchasing System
Pedro Szekely, Bob Neches, David P. Benjamin, Jinbo Chen, and Craig Milo Rogers

USC/Information Institute
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
(szekely, neches, benjamin, jinbo, rogers)@isi.edu
(310) 822-1511

Description of an application.  Long paper (4-10pp).
Keywords: Business Rules;  Business Rule Editor; Rule Editor; User Programming; Electronic Commerce; Source Selection; Supplier Selection; Contract Representation; XML

[Abstract]  [Full paper in HTML]  [Full paper in PDF]
 

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Link: ISI's AIEC99 paper on DEALMAKER in HTML
URL: http://www.isi.edu/~szekely/publications/isi-dealmaker-aiec99.html
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Link: ISI's AIEC99 paper on DEALMAKER in PDF
URL: http://www.isi.edu/~szekely/publications/isi-dealmaker-aiec99.pdf
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Link: ISI's AIEC99 paper on DEALMAKER in Postscript
URL: http://www.isi.edu/~szekely/publications/isi-dealmaker-aiec99.ps

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Link: ISI's AIEC99 paper on DEALMAKER for Word97
URL: http://www.isi.edu/~szekely/publications/isi-dealmaker-aiec99.doc

Reference

Szekely, et al. 1999.  Controlling Supplier Selection in an Automated Purchasing System.  In Proceedings of the AAAI99 Workshop on AI in Electronic Commerce (AIEC99). Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press.

Abstract

We present a system called DEALMAKER that allows users to specify policies that control selection among preferred suppliers in an automated purchasing system.  The system gives users control over the automation by providing an expressive language and a convenient, easy-to-use user interface to specify the policies.  The interesting and challenging aspect of the problem arises from the context in which the system operates. The end users are contract managers and buyers who are not trained in computers or programming.  They enter their new supply contracts and define policy rules to control selection of the best contracts for buying requested parts.  They act as their own knowledge engineers, even though the system is expected to have hundreds of rules for hundreds of contracts. The users interact with the system infrequently, perhaps only a few times a month when they begin or modify contracts, or change policies.  Along with a moderate turnover rate of users, this makes it crucial that they can easily maintain correct rules with minimal training.  In this paper, we describe a rule system and an interactive rule authoring tool designed to address the problems raised by this context. We believe these issues arise in most application domains where rule systems are put in the hands of the end users.

Contact

For more information, send email to DEALMAKER@isi.edu or to any of the authors.


File: isi-dealm-pub-aiec99.html
Last updated: 19990514 by benjamin@isi.edu