KEYWORDS: Ant Colony Optimization, Buyer Coalition, Coalition Structure, Simulation
ABSTRACT: Buyer coalition formation has become a popular topic for researchers in electronic marketing for years. The majority of this endeavour is to find the best buyer formation to earn more utility from sellers as much as possible. However, in electronic marketplaces, there are few schemes applying an ant colony optimization (ACO) for forming the group buying to obtain the best discount form sellers. In this paper, the proposed approach called the buyer coalition formation by using two ant colony optimizations (BCF_2ACO) searches for the best way to from a buyer coalition according to the total utility earned from sellers. The first ant colony finds the best disjoint subsets of all buyers based on the total utility obtained by the works of the second colony of artificial ants. The second ant colony discovers the way to purchase several units of goods within bundles of items to receive the best total utility to partitioned groups of buyers. The simulation shows that in most cases the proposed algorithm forms the group buying efficiently in the term of buyer's utility.
