Evidential Reasoning-Based Evaluation of Services

Abstract

Evaluation of services plays an important role in the pre-negotiation process for negotiations over services between autonomous agents. Typically, the service evaluation problem can be regarded as multi-attribute decision making, possibly with uncertainty. This chapter first presents an overview on some decision models, which have been used for evaluating service offers in negotiations, and then discusses the issue of handling uncertainty and imprecision in the service evaluation process by a combined approach for evaluation in order to provide decision support in the pre-negotiation process. Finally, the chapter introduces an evidential reasoning-based model for evaluation of services illustrated by a numerical example.