A bid evaluation system for Internet contract negotiation

Competitive advantages in a fast-changing electronic procurement market are enabling buyers to explore many opportunities to purchase the best commodities, not only at the most favorable prices, but also to satisfy business objectives and organizational strategies. Some seasonal commodities and future contracts have to deal with uncontrollable factors such as the elasticity of the price and the constant variation of the demand. These trends present some new challenges in bid evaluations and business decisions. We have developed a system, which uses a hierarchical decision-criteria framework to handle complex constraint hierarchy with n-ary variables. In addition, the system provides the mechanism to analyze and forecast certain events based on the seasonal and historical data.