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An Agent-Based Electronic Commerce Marketplace

Steven Fonseca
( Puerto Rican )

University of California, Santa Cruz
1729 Caulfield Lane Petaluma, CA 94954 USA USA
tel: 831-234-0641
fax:
fonseca@cse.ucsc.edu

Keywords:

distribution electronic commerce software agents

Abstract:

Proliferation of the Internet has induced the recent surge of electronic commerce as businesses establish their online presence. Agent-based electronic commerce involves multiple intelligent agents mediating business transactions on behalf of businesses and consumers. This has imposed new demands for software that can work across the Internet in a dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous environment composed of many software entities that must communicate with one another. The potential for agent-based electronic commerce, though promising, has not yet been established as a viable technology. First, such interaction requires an established agent platform architecture that can accommodate many agents and an efficient multi-agent interaction scheme. Experience suggests that support for dynamic ontology loading, possible handling of mobile agents, and a web-based interface for agent control must also be considered. Agent technology should evolve in an acutely self-aware manner that continuously focuses on keeping the trust of its users. The typical issues found in the commerce domain including security, privacy, and trust necessitate this.

Research is being conducted to explore the many requirements of agent-based electronic commerce. Additionally, this exploration includes identifying best methods for designing facilitating agents that provide the society infrastructure, comparing the tradeoffs of utilizing heavyweight and lightweight agents, the role of XML for common agent information exchange, and encapsulation and separation of social responsibility for plug-and-play behavior. Ancillary research includes best methods for creating a debugging development environment and visualization of agent society interaction.

British Telecommunication's Zeus Toolkit serves as the foundation for building agents while also providing an initial agent infrastructure. Modifications, extensions, and deletions to this system are underway. By August 2000 a complete agent-based electronic commerce simulation is scheduled for deployment.

The PhD work started: January 2000

The participant will apply for the
upcoming ECOOP PhD Workshop.

HTML3
JAVA

 

Last modified on Mon Aug 15 14:59:24 2005