by Guanghao Yan, Wee-Keong Ng and Ee-Peng Lim
December 6, 1998
This article is divided into 8 parts:
Electronic commerce is a rapidly growing area accompanied by the growth of the Internet. As information on the Internet becomes more dynamic and heterogeneous, `software agents' have been touted as the new building blocks for a new Internet structure. We foresee a future whereby the Web is populated with as many software agents as there are web documents today. Organizations will not only establish web presence via web sites alone, they will also provide agents to interact with other agents. Our project investigates issues in building the infrastructure for such a large scale, distributed, agent-based web commerce system. Our approach is to provide toolkits for users to create and customize buyer and seller agents quickly. This paper describes our preliminary work in the engineering of such buyer and seller toolkits.
1. Introduction
The World Wide Web has dramatically changed the way people live. More and more tasks can be performed on the Web now. One such area that is growing rapidly is electronic commerce. Nowadays, people can shop for products and services online. Pete Ellis' Auto-By-Tel sells US$2 billion annually letting customers access its dealer affiliate database, and negotiate a deal over the Web (1). Forrester Research predicts that electronic commerce on the Internet would be worth as much as US\$45 billion by the year 2000.
With staggering growths of information in recent years, the Web has become more dynamic and heterogeneous. This makes it more difficult for people to search for information or to locate relevant web sites effectively. In order to alleviate this situation, software agents have been used to reduce work and information overload (2) and to provide services to humans like a concierge (3) on the Web. Work has been done in combining software agent technology with electronic commerce; examples include ShopBot (now Jango) at the University of Washington (6), MAGMA in University of Minnesota (4), and MIT's Kasbah Marketplace (5). With software agents, routine electronic transactions can be automated to a certain extent and hence human involvement is reduced.
The Agent-based Web Commerce Project at the School of Applied Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, started in April 1997 with the following key objective: To design and implement a software infrastructure for a very large, distributed, agent-based web commerce system. We envisage a future whereby the Web is populated with as many software agents as there are web sites today. This project aims to construct generic prototypes for three types of agents: buyer agents, seller agents and directory agents:
- On the seller side, we provide a software toolkit integrating web authoring, database management and agent technology. This toolkit allows an organization to create and maintain web pages. Information for public access on web pages comes from a database system. This toolkit also creates seller agents for the organization. While web pages provide information to humans as well as agents, seller agents provide services to other agents.
- We also provide a software toolkit for creating buyer agents for individuals or organizations. A buyer agent is built with the basic capability to perform routine and simple tasks. More complicated tasks may involve human instructions but once instructed, they are cached for future use by the agents.
- A directory agent keeps information about agents. It corresponds to conventional search engines that provide links to web sites based on keywords. When an agent needs to locate other agents possessing certain capabilities, it searches the directory agent. Directory agents have unique URLs that are well known.
The project looks into agent interaction protocols for buyer and seller agents so that all agents created by the toolkits will be able to communicate with one another. In the aspect of electronic payment, we use existing electronic payment systems. Both the buyer and seller agents can be customized to the specific needs and domains of individuals and organizations. Once customized, they have unique URLs (just like web sites today). One of our goals is to enable quick and easy widespread deployment of agents by individuals and organizations.
The organization of this paper is as follows: The next section provides an overview of the architecture of our web commerce system. Sections 3, 4 and 5 elaborate on the three types of agents. In Section 6, we discuss agent interactions. Related work is briefly discussed in Section 7 and the last section summarizes the paper.
This article is divided into 8 parts:
This article is reprinted with kind permission from the book:
Electronic Commerce
ISBN 3-932588-24-X
Published by:
dpunkt
The book is reviewed here in the WDJ.
Nanyang Technological University Center for Advanced Information Systems
School of Applied Science
Singapore 639798
Singapore
| 
