The Internet has changed the way business is performed. By fundamentally changing the interactions between the businesses and their consumers, it offers new opportunities to trade products and services effectively and efficiently in a global economy. Electronic commerce on the Internet has resulted in a profound transformation of consumer attitudes, expectations and behavior. In recent years, software agents have been proposed to develop next-generation electronic commerce systems. They offer many potential benefits, which result in a paradigm shift in the evolution of electronic commerce. This paper provides an account of software agents in electronic commerce, and presents the broad research challenges in agent-based electronic commerce.
Electronic
Commerce (e-commerce) is increasingly playing an important
role in business organizations as well as for individuals.
It offers opportunities to significantly improve the business
processes in terms of interaction, personalization, and agility.
It makes the business processes faster and cheaper. As a result,
e-commerce is growing rapidly. Millions of regular shoppers
browse for product information and conduct some form of online
transactions on the Internet. The eMarketer forecasts
(see Figure 1) that Business-to-Commerce (B2C) e-commerce
sales in the Asia-Pacific region will grow at a 23.3% annual
rate, reaching $168.7 bn in 2011. Japan is currently the largest
market, by far, followed by South Korea. But by 2011 both
are expected to lose their share to two up-and-comers, China
and India.E-commerce
provides a number of potential advantages over traditional
commerce in terms of price, choice, convenience, personalization,
information-rich decisions, sense of community and loyalty.
It creates a self-service economy empowering consumers with
high degree of control.
During
the past decade, multi-agent systems have been recognized
as a very promising technology to develop next-generation
e-commerce systems by addressing many issues prevailing today.
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, in e-commerce. 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. |
