An agent system architecture for e-commerce

Mobile agents are autonomous objects that are able to migrate from node to node in a computer network. A number of general purpose mobile agent architectures have been developed in the recent past. Though the core abstractions and functionalities are common to them, they employ a number of ad hoc solutions that make them either too restrictive or too general for the purpose of an open mobile-agent based e-commerce system. This led us to develop an mobile agent architecture of our own that will effectively address the issues of communication, tracking and naming in a manner that is most suitable for e-commerce applications. Our implementation is based on Java 2. In this paper, we describe the current state Of our agent system infrastructure, focusing on the implementation issues on agent mobility, communication and tracking.