The Role of Agent Technology in Business to Business Electronic Commerce

The purpose of business-to-business electronic commerce is to improve the way businesses trade by creating a secure networked environment in which businesses may exchange information, knowledge, goods and services. However, interoperability of the diversity of systems for tele-cooperation and global electronic commerce is not an easy task to achieve. The diversity of information systems generates incompatibilities which need to be surmounted before advanced business-to-business electronic commerce applications are developed. Agent-oriented technology can help eliminate some of these problems by facilitating the incorporation of reasoning capabilities within the business application logic and by enabling the inclusion of learning and self improvement capabilities at both infrastructure and application levels. In this paper we discuss agent-oriented support for business-to-business electronic commerce and introduce three difierent categories of information agents based on their functionality and competence.

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