Building Electronic Marketplaces with the ZEUS Agent Tool-kit

The increasing popularity of the Internet provides personal computer users with direct access to a wealth of information sources and services, and potentially a massive global marketplace. Unfortunately current home shopping systems are primitive; what the consumer wants is a personal shopping agent -an intelligent, reliable proxy who is aware of personal preferences, and who can take over the tedious task of searching the Internet for the best possible deal. Likewise retailers would like to use the Internet to attract a much larger volume of potential customers, who could be serviced quickly and efficiently at a much lower cost. This vision is seductive, so why has it not yet been realised? This paper considers why agent-based commerce is inherently difficult, and advocates collaborative agent technology as a means of more easily building distributed marketplaces. To illustrate this principle we have built a prototype multi-agent virtual marketplace with ZEUS, a generic collaborative agent tool-kit.