Multi-Objective Modelling-Based Matching Approach between Trading Agents through a Broker with Price Discount Policies as per Quantity in B2B E-marketplace

Abstract

A broker in B2B e-marketplace enables buyers and sellers to do business with each other and can provide many value-adding functions that cannot be replaced by direct buyer-seller dealing. Although some recent research has focused on this issue, broker modelling based on buyers’ membership function and sellers’ price discount policies as per buying quantity to carry out matching buyers’ requirements and sellers’ offers is still sparse. Based on the mentioned analysis, this paper proposes a novel approach to match buyers and sellers through a broker. The major contributions of this paper are that (i) a proposed approach is applicable to help a broker to carry out matching processes; (ii) a mathematical model is proposed to model sellers’ price discount function as per buying quantity and buyers’ requirements in fuzzy preference information in multi-attribute trading; and (iii) a multi-objective function is built to help a broker to consider the combination of broker, buyer and seller's maximal utility. The results of simulation experiment demonstrate the proposed approach are flexible, it provides a set of solutions to achieve optimal matching pairs to support decision-makers.