Combining Rule-Based and Plug-in Components in Agents for Flexible Dynamic Negotiations

For software agents to become part of e-commerce they have to be flexible – to engage in negotiations of forms which are not known in advance, and mobile – to migrate to remote locations. This note aims at combining flexibility with mobility by joining rule-based mechanism representation with modular mobile agents. Furthermore, we focus on a more complete e-commerce scenario and address questions like: what happens before negotiations start and after they are finished, where from the purchase is actually made etc. Description of agent interactions in such a complete e-commerce scenario is presented