An Extended AND-OR Graph-Based Expert System in Electronic Commerce

The objective of this paper is to propose a brand new interface mechanism to provide more intelligent decision making support for EC problems. Its main virtue is based on a numerical process mechanism by using an Extended AND-OR Graph (EAOG)-based logic algebra. Using this mechanism, decision makers engaged in electronic commerce (EC) can effectively deal with complicated decision making problems. In the field of traditional expert systems research, AND-OR Graph approach has been suggested as a useful tool for representing the logic flowchart of the forward and/or backward chaining inference methods. However, the AND-OR Graph approach cannot be effectively used in the EC problems in which real-time problem-solving property should be highly required. In this sense, we propose the EAOG inference mechanism for EC problem-solving in which heurisric knowledge necessary for intelligent EC problem-solving can be represented in a form of matrix. Finally, we have proved the validity of our approach with several propositions and an illustrative EC example