Abstract
The new concept of soft computing based distributed multi-agent marketing decision support system (DSS) is proposed in this paper. The DSS is composed of a number of parallel intelligent agents acting in a distributed mode, and one coordinating agent for evaluation of solutions. Generation of a final solution in DSS is achieved through cooperative and competitive interactions among intelligent agents. The main idea of the proposed DSS is based on decomposition of the overall system intelligence among cooperative autonomous intelligent agents capable of competing and cooperating with each other in order to propose total solution to the problem and to integrate local solutions into the final solution. Each distributed intelligent agent is implemented as fuzzy knowledge based system with modest number of rules. The agent-coordinator (evaluator) evaluates the proposals and ranks the fuzzy values of the outcome produced by intelligent contending agents. The outcome of each agent is estimated on the basis of its solution, input information, and other necessary information using a neuro-fuzzy estimator tuned by a genetic algorithm. The proposed concept for designing DSS is illustrated through a marketing-mix DSS.