A Broker-Based Optimal Matching Approach of Buyers and Sellers for Multi-attribute Exchanges in Open Markets

A broker acts as a middleman between buyers and sellers in the trading processes to achieve its profit as well as to satisfy buyer´s requirements based on seller´s offers. This paper proposes a broker-based optimal matching approach in the markets. The major contributions of this paper include (1) an abstract model of a broker agent, that is applicable to a broad range of market types, (2) predicting buyers and sellers´ behavior by using Bayes´ rule so that a broker can identify an appropriate allocation of items between buyers and sellers, and (3) an objective function and a set of constraints to help a broker to maximize its profit under consideration of buyer and seller´s total satisfaction. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach in terms of satisfying buyer´s requirements and maximizing broker´s profit.