Agent Based E-Market: Framework, Design, and Implementation

Attempt has been made to design and develop a complete adoptive Multi Agent System pertaining to merchant brokering stage of Customer Buying Behaviour Model with the intent of appropriate framework. Intelligent agents are autonomous entity which observe and act upon an environment. In general, they are software robots and vitally used in variety of e-Business applications. This paper focuses on the discussions on electronic markets and the adoptive role, which agents can play in information transformation for automating e-market transactions. It is proposed to develop a framework for agent-based electronic markets for buyers and sellers totally with the assistance of software agents.Agent Oriented e-Business, Agent Oriented e-Markets, Buyer/Seller Agents, Java, Multi Agent Systems

Ontology acquisition and exchange of evolutionary product-brokering agents

Agent-based electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been booming with the development of the Internet and agent technologies. However, little effort has been devoted to exploring the learning and evolving capabilities of software agents. This paper addresses issues of evolving software agents in e-commerce applications. An agent structure with evolution features is proposed with a focus on internal hierarchical knowledge. We argue that knowledge base of agents should be the cornerstone for their evolution capabilities, and agents can enhance their knowledge bases by exchanging knowledge with other agents. In this paper, product ontology is chosen as an instance of knowledge base. We propose a new approach to facilitate ontology exchange among e-commerce agents. The ontology exchange model and its formalities are elaborated. Product-brokering agents have been designed and implemented, which accomplish the ontology exchange process from request to integration

Multi-agent system for consumer-oriented electronic commerce

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.With the advent of the information superhighway and the exponential growth of the Internet usage, the importance of multi-agent systems is proliferating. The central theme of this thesis is to demonstrate the benefits of adopting multi-agent system (MAS) paradigm to implement consumer oriented electronic commerce system. The discipline of computational science is exploited to provide insights into the behaviour of a model of consumer behaviour that reflect the cognitive notion that the thesis has developed. For this, a multi-agent system computational environment is used to model and investigate the consumer purchase over the Internet. The MAS is developed based on a presented taxonomy, that is most relevant to the thesis application. The thesis also presents a novel approach to negotiation. Results of empirical evaluations provide a strong support that agents using the proposed approach would achieve higher payoff than human subjects. An empirical evaluation for the usability of the prototype system is also presented. Reported results are very encouraging to implement a fieldable system. To complement the perspective for a complete consumer-oriented EC system, the thesis addresses and develops approaches for searching and extracting relevant information. Example experiments are also reported to act as indicators for the effectiveness of the developed approaches

Ontological Approach to Domain Knowledge Representation for Information Retrieval in Multiagent Systems

An ontological representation of buyer interests’ knowledge in process of e-commerce is proposed to use. It makes it more efficient to make a search of the most appropriate sellers via multiagent systems. An algorithm of a comparison of buyer ontology with one of e-shops (the taxonomies) and an e-commerce multiagent system are realised using ontology of information retrieval in distributed environment

On Automated Message Processing in Electronic Commerce and Work Support Systems: Speech Act Theory and Expressive Felicity

Electronic messaging, whether in an office environment or for electronic commerce, is normally carried out in natural language, even when supported by information systems. For a variety of reasons, it would be useful if electronic messaging systems could have semantic access to, that is, access to the meanings and contents of, the messages they process. Given that natural language understanding is not a practicable alternative, there remain three approaches to delivering systems with semantic access: electronic data interchange (EDI), tagged messages, and the development of a formal language for business communication (FLBC). We favor the latter approach. In this article we compare and contrast these three approaches, present a theoretical basis for an FLBC (using speech act theory), and describe a prototype implementation

Applying mobile agents to E-business

[[abstract]]E-commerce and M-commerce can extend the marketing of a company or enterprise to unlimited region. Through Internet and WWW, the limitation of distance and region are broken for business behaviors. Agent technique is one of the important technologies developed to support the Internet applications. Especially, the Internet and WWW technologies broken the limitation of space, and the agent techniques solve the problems of temporality. Even if the users are off-line, the agents are still active in the world of computer network and play the roles that their users assigned. In this paper, a mechanism is proposed for E-marketplace based on agents and mobile agents. Some issues of research are discussed. They include the platform of mobile agents, the types and classifications of agents and mobile agents, behaviors of commerce transactions and processing models, negotiation mechanisms, etc. Moreover, they include the techniques of information retrieval, data mining, and knowledge base, etc. Based on the proposed mechanism of E-marketplace, the applications of E-commerce will be more effective, easier to develop, and more creating the marketing of business.[[notice]]補正完

Electronic commerce An open electronic marketplace through agent-based workflows: MOPPET

Abstract. We propose an electronic marketplace architecture, called MOPPET, where the commerce processes in the marketplace are modeled as adaptable agent-based workflows. The higher level of abstraction provided by the workflow technology makes the customization of electronic commerce processes for different users possible. Agent-based implementation, on the other hand, provides for a highly reusable component-based workflow architecture as well as negotiation ability and the capability to adapt to dynamic changes in the environment. Agent communication is handled through Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML). A workflow-based architecture also makes it possible for complete modeling of electronic commerce processes by allowing involved parties to be able to invoke already existing applications or to define new tasks and to re-structure the control and data flow among the tasks to create custom built process definitions. In the proposed architecture all data exchanges are realized through Extensible Markup Language (XML) providing uniformity, simplicity and a highly open and interoperable architecture. Metadata of activities are expressed through Resource Description Framework (RDF). Common Business Library (CBL) is used for achieving interoperability across business domains and domain specific Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are used for vertical industries. We provide our own specifications for missing DTDs to be replaced by the original specifications when they become available

Combining MAS and P2P Systems: The Agent Trees Multi-Agent System (ATMAS)

The seamless retrieval of information distributed across networks has been one of the key goals of many systems. Early solutions involved the use of single static agents which would retrieve the unfiltered data and then process it. However, this was deemed costly and inefficient in terms of the bandwidth since complete files need to be downloaded when only a single value is often all that is required. As a result, mobile agents were developed to filter the data in situ before returning it to the user. However, mobile agents have their own associated problems, namely security and control. The Agent Trees Multi-Agent System (AT-MAS) has been developed to provide the remote processing and filtering capabilities but without the need for mobile code. It is implemented as a Peer to Peer (P2P) network of static intelligent cooperating agents, each of which control one or more data sources. This dissertation describes the two key technologies have directly influenced the design of ATMAS, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). P2P systems are conceptually simple, but limited in power, whereas MAS are significantly more complex but correspondingly more powerful. The resulting system exhibits the power of traditional MAS systems while retaining the simplicity of P2P systems. The dissertation describes the system in detail and analyses its performance