Using Intelligent Agents to Build E-Business Software

Agent architectures are gaining popularity for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by e-commerce applications. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining patterns and languages for agent architectural design. This paper proposes a modern approach based on organizational structures and architectural description languages to define and specify agent architectures notably in the case of e-commerce system design. The meteoric rise of Internet and World-Wide-Web technologies has created overnight new application areas for enterprise software, including e-commerce applications. These areas demand software that is robust, can operate within a wide range of environments, and can evolve over time to cope with changing requirements. Moreover, such software has to be highly customisable to meet the needs of a wide range of users and sufficiently secure to protect personal data and other assets on behalf of its stakeholders. Not surprisingly, researchers are looking for new software designs that cope with such requirements. One promising source of ideas for designing such e-commerce software is the area of agent architectures. They appear to be more flexible, modular and robust than traditional including object-oriented ones. They tend to be open and dynamic in the sense they exist in a changing organizational and operational environment where new components can be added, modified or removed at any time. To cope with the ever-increasing complexity of the design of software architecture, architectural design has received through the last decade increasing attention as an important field of software engineering. Practitioners have come to realize that getting an architecture right is a critical success factor for system life-cycle and have recognized the value of making explicit architectural descriptions and choices in the development of new software.