Fuzzy Cognitive Map-Based Simulation Framework for Supporting Electronic Commerce

As the Internet has been used widely in modern firms for gaining competitive advantage in the market, EC (Electronic Commerce) emerged as one of strong alternatives for this purpose. Many researchers and practitioners have proposed a wide variety of EC frameworks that can consider only the structured conditions, but there exists no EC mechanism in which engaged entities can take into account the various unstructured conditions. With the conventional EC framework, the structured EC conditions such as price, quantity, delivery date, etc. can be fully negotiated during the EC process. However, no studies have been conducted on the issue of incorporating those unstructured conditions which are difficult to represent in an explicit form and therefore hard to consider explicitly during the EC Process. They are characterized by causal properties. This means that we should have a new EC mechanism which is capable of dealing with causal knowledge. In this sense, we propose a FCM (Fuzzy Cognitive Map)-based simulation framework for EC to resolve the problem of considering the unstructured conditions during the EC process. We experimented our prototype with several illustrative examples and proved that our approach is robust and meaningful.