Building distributed heterogeneous smart phone Java applications an evaluation from a development perspective

The advances in mobile phone technology have enabled such devices to be programmed to run general-purpose applications using a special edition of the Java programming language. Java is designed to be a heterogeneous programming language targeting different platforms. Such ability when coupled with the provision of high-speed mobile Internet access would open the door for a new breed of distributed mobile applications. This paper explores the capabilities and limitations of this technology and addresses the considerations that must be taken when designing and developing such distributed applications. Our findings are verified by building a test client-server system where the clients in this system are mobile phones behaving as active processing elements not just mere service requesters

A multi-agent architecture for electronic payment

The Internet has brought about innumerable changes to the way enterprises do business. An essential problem to be solved before the widespread commercial use of the Internet is to provide a trustworthy solution for electronic payment. We propose a multi-agent mediated electronic payment architecture in this paper. It is aimed at providing an agent-based approach to accommodate multiple e-payment schemes. Through a layered design of the payment structure and a well-defined uniform payment interface, the architecture shows good scalability. When a new e-payment scheme or implementation is available, it can be plugged into the framework easily. In addition, we construct a framework allowing multiple agents to work cooperatively to realize automation of electronic payment. A prototype has been built to illustrate the functionality of this design. Finally we discuss the security issues

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

Integrity protection for code-on-demand mobile agents in e-commerce

The mobile agent paradigm has been proposed as a promising solution to facilitate distributed computing over open and heterogeneous networks. Mobility, autonomy, and intelligence are identified as key features of mobile agent systems and enabling characteristics for the next-generation smart electronic commerce on the Internet. However, security-related issues, especially integrity protection in mobile agent technology, still hinder the widespread use of software agents: from the agent’s perspective, mobile agent integrity should be protected against attacks from malicious hosts and other agents. In this paper, we present Code-on-Demand(CoD) mobile agents and a corresponding agent integrity protection scheme. Compared to the traditional assumption that mobile agents consist of invariant code parts, we propose the use of dynamically upgradeable agent code, in which new agent function modules can be added and redundant ones can be deleted at runtime. This approach will reduce the weight of agent programs, equip mobile agents with more flexibility, enhance code privacy and help the recoverability of agents after attack. In order to meet the security challenges for agent integrity protection, we propose agent code change authorization protocols and a double integrity verification scheme. Finally, we discuss the Java implementation of CoD mobile agents and integrity protection

SMEs, electronically-mediated working and data security: cause for concern?

Security of data is critical to the operations of firms. Without the ability to store, process and transmit data securely, operations may be compromised, with the potential for serious consequences to trading integrity. Thus the role that electronically-mediated working plays in business today and its dependency on data security is of critical interest, especially in light of the fact that much of this communication is based on the use of open networks (i.e. the Internet). This paper discusses findings from a 'WestFocus' survey on electronically-mediated working and telework amongst a sample of SMEs located in West London and adjacent counties in South-Eastern England in order to highlight the problems that such practice raises in terms of data security. Data collection involved a telephone survey undertaken in early 2006 of 378 firms classified into four industrial sectors ('Media', 'Logistics', 'Internet Services' and 'Food Processing'). After establishing how ICTs and the Internet are being exploited as business applications for small firms, data security practice is explored on the basis of sector and size with a focus on telework. The paper goes on to highlight areas of concern in terms of data security policy and training practice. Findings show some sector and size influences.WestFocus* under the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF 2

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

HandyBroker - An intelligent product-brokering agent for M-commerce applications with user preference tracking

One of the potential applications for agent-based systems is m-commerce. A lot of research has been done on making such systems intelligent to personalize their services for users. In most systems, user-supplied keywords are generally used to help generate profiles for users. In this paper, an evolutionary ontology-based product-brokering agent has been designed for m-commerce applications. It uses an evaluation function to represent a user’s preference instead of the usual keyword-based profile. By using genetic algorithms, the agent tracks the user’s preferences for a particular product by tuning some parameters inside its evaluation function. A prototype called “Handy Broker” has been implemented in Java and the results obtained from our experiments looks promising for m-commerce use

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