SAFE: Secure-Roaming Agents for E-commerce

The development of the Internet has made a powerful impact on the concept of commerce. E-commerce, a new way to conduct business, is gaining more and more popularity. Despite its rapid growth, there are limitations that hinder the expansion of e-commerce. The primary concern for most people when talking about on-line shopping is security. Due to the open nature of the Internet, personal financial details necessary for on-line shopping can be stolen if sufficient security mechanism is not put in place. How to provide the necessary assurance of security to consumers remains a question mark despite various past efforts. Another concern is the lack of intelligence. The Internet is an ocean of information depository. It is rich in content but lacks the necessary intelligent tools to help one locate the correct piece of information. Intelligent agent, a piece of software that can act on behalf of its owner intelligently, is designed to fill this gap. However, no matter how intelligent an agent is, if it remains on its owner’s machine and does not have any roaming capability, its functionality is limited. With the roaming capability, more security concerns arise. In response to these concerns, SAFE, Secure roaming Agent For E-commerce, is designed to provide secure roaming capability to intelligent agents

A Step towards Softbots: Easy2Shop, a Multi Agent based Shopping bot

With the emergence and omnipresence of e-commerce on the internet, online purchasing assistants and applications have made their appearance. More commonly known as “shop bots†these intelligent agents facilitate the purchasing process, therefore saving time and money. Most shop bots provide you with a list of companies offering the best price and service for the product that you want. The first shop bot Bargain Finder was developed in 1995 by Andersen consulting and it was designed to help people find only musical CDs. Today, Shop bots are capable of finding a wide variety of products and services offered on the internet. These intelligent agents help you to make the best choice when looking for CDs, DVDs, books, computers, software, and cars. Keywords: Intelligent agents, Shopping bots, E-Commerce, Multi agents, Robotics, Easy2Shop, Intelligent agent criteria, Soft bots

Defects of the will in software agents contracting

The use of intelligent software agents brings along a lot of new issues in what contracting is concerned. Actually, to speak about contracts there must be two or more declarations of will, containing a consensual agreement, consisting of an offer and of an acceptance. But intelligent software agents operate in electronic commerce without any direct intervention of humans, and they have a control on their own actions and on their own inner state. So, legal difficulties obviously arise in such situations of contracting through the only intervention and interaction of autonomous intelligent systems. Thus being, the analysis of the process of formation of will and of issuing of declaration in electronic contracts negotiated (and eventually performed) by electronic software agents will be crucial to the development of intelligent inter-systemic electronic contracting. But, may the the rules of will defects be adapted to software agent contracting?Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Intelligent Agents and Legal Relations project (POCTI/JUR/57221/2004

Formal models in web based contracting

Legal principles have some difficulty to deal with software agents celebrating contracts and operating in e-commerce environments without direct human intervention. Autonomous intelligent agents have a control on their own actions and states, supporting or taking effective decisions. Therefore, some qualitative parameters such as trust, reputation and quality of information have to be taken under consideration to evaluate, certify and justify such decisions. Indeed, this paper shows how to construct a dynamic virtual world of complex and interacting entities or agents, organized in terms of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), that compete against one another in order to solve a particular problem, according to a rigorous selection regime in which its fitness is judged by one criterion alone, a measure of the quality of information of the agent or agents, here understood as evolutionary logic theories. This virtual world could witness the emergence of our first learning, thinking machines, that may cater for some issues on the evolution of formal models of the world in general, and on what is concerned with the objectives set to this work, in contracting, and foray into a vast, untapped technological market.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Intelligent Agents and Legal Relations Project – POCTI/ JUR/57221/2004

Experienced agents with attitude in a virtual marketplace.

Agent technology evolved from a number of disciplines such as object technology, distributed computing and artificial intelligence. There is currently a growing need to develop intelligent agents that engage in buying and selling in virtual marketplaces owing to exponential growth of e-commerce. For e-commerce to become a reality, and before users can trust software agents to buy and sell items on their behalf, some intelligence that makes humans good buyers and sellers must be simulated. In this thesis report we suggest a prototype of a virtual marketplace where agents negotiate to buy and sell goods. The agents in this framework represent the three important attributes of mental state (attitude) of their clients. These agents learn limitedly from their previous experiences and adjust their attitude. Learning from experience is modeled using Case Based Reasoning (CBR) Techniques. Our proposed framework suggests that it is possible to build software agents, which model limited aspects of negotiation in buying and selling. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2001 .S28. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 40-03, page: 0728. Adviser: Walid S. Saba. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2001

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

Agent fabrication and its implementation for agent-based electronic commerce

In the last decade, agent-based e-commerce has emerged as a potential role for the next generation of e-commerce. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become a serious consideration in this field. This paper proposes a new scheme named agent fabrication and elaborates its implementation in multi-agent systems based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) architecture. First, a conceptual structure is proposed for software agents carrying out e-commerce activities. Furthermore, agent module suitcase is defined to facilitate agent fabrication. With these definitions and facilities in the SAFER architecture, the formalities of agent fabrication are elaborated. In order to enhance the security of agent-based e-commerce, an infrastructure of agent authorization and authentication is integrated in agent fabrication. Our implementation and prototype applications show that the proposed agent fabrication scheme brings forth a potential solution for creating agents in agent-based e-commerce applications

A Factory-based Approach to Support E-commerce Agent Fabrication

With the development of Internet computing and software agent technologies, agent-based e-commerce is emerging. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become an important issue along the way to success. We propose a factory-based approach to support agent fabrication in e-commerce and elaborate a design based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) framework. The details of agent fabrication, modular agent structure, agent life cycle, as well as advantages of agent fabrication are presented. Product-brokering agent is employed as a practical agent type to demonstrate our design and Java-based implementation

A modularized electronic payment system for agent-based e-commerce

With the explosive growth of the Internet, electronic-commerce (e-commerce) is an increasingly important segment of commercial activities on the web. The Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming (SAFER) architecture was proposed to further facilitate e-commerce using agent technology. In this paper, the electronic payment aspect of SAFER will be explored. The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol and E-Cash were selected as the bases for the electronic payment system implementation. The various modules of the payment system and how they interface with each other are shown. An extensible implementation done using JavaTM will also be elaborated. This application incorporates agent roaming functionality and the ability to conduct e-commerce transactions and carry out intelligent e-payment procedures

SOLACE: A framework for electronic negotiations

Copyright @ 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbHMost existing frameworks for electronic negotiations today are tied to specific negotiation systems for which they were developed, preventing them from being applied to other negotiation scenarios. Thus, the evaluation of electronic negotiation systems is difficult as each one is based on a different framework. Additionally, each developer has to design a new framework for any system to be developed, leading to a ‘reinvention of the wheel’. This paper presents SOLACE—a generic framework for multi-issue negotiations, which can be applied to a variety of negotiation scenarios. In contrast with other frameworks for electronic negotiations, SOLACE supports hybrid systems in which the negotiation participants can be humans, agents or a combination of the two. By recognizing the importance of strategies in negotiations and incorporating a time attribute in negotiation proposals, SOLACE enhances existing approaches and provides a foundation for the flexible electronic negotiation systems of the future