The Internet has revolutionized the way business is performed. It offers new vistas for
buyers and sellers to trade goods and services effectively and efficiently in a networked
economy. It has fundamentally changed the interaction between a business organization
and its customers. As a result, websites that display product catalogues and accept
orders and payments electronically are mushrooming. The number of people buying
and selling on the Internet and the volume of e-commerce transactions are growing
at a phenomenal rate. However, the present day e-commerce has several shortcomings.
The most important one is the lack of flexibility in the buying process. Moreover, the
buying process is not fully automated. While information about different products and
vendors is more easily accessible, and also orders and payments are accepted
electronically, a human buyer is still involved in all stages of the buying process, which
adds up to the transaction cost and time.
Recently, multi-agent systems have been recognized as a very promising technology
to develop next-generation e-commerce systems by addressing many of the issues
prevailing today (Kurbel and Iouri, 2001). It is believed that software agents with
decision-autonomy (i.e., intelligence) and location-autonomy (i.e., mobility) will make
a paradigm shift in the evolution of e-commerce systems. Software agents are software entities, which act on behalf of humans, automate several business processes such as
product and merchant brokering, negotiation, payment and delivery, etc., in
e-commerce (Guttman et al., 1998). They communicate with each other using
semantically rich agent communication language, influence each other and negotiate
on conflicting issues to make deals in e-commerce. They often move from host to host
in a network, use intelligent strategies on behalf of their users and act proactively to
reach goals assigned to them. Mobile agents which offer a more flexible alternative to
traditional client-server computing, provide several potential advantages such as
reduced network traffic and latency, persistence, asynchronous interaction, support
for heterogeneous environment and adaptability (Danny et al., 1999). Mobile agents
representing human buyers and sellers move on the Internet and carry out e-commerce
activities on behalf of them, autonomously and intelligently making e-commerce
applications more interesting and closer to reality.
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