V-Market: A framework for agent e-commerce systems

Software agent technology is still an emerging technology, and as such, agent based software design is still in its infancy. Software agents have just started to be used in the e-commerce domain, and they are already beginning to create a series of new possibilities for this arena. Agents can be used to automate, as well as to enhance many stages of the traditional consumer-buying behavior process. This paper proposes a software engineering approach to the design of agent mediated e-commerce systems, through the definition of an object-oriented framework. The paper presents the underlying concepts, and the architecture of the environment, showing how it allows developers to customize virtual marketplaces, and to define transaction categories on demand, incorporating many possible products and services that can be traded online.

[1]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  Ontolingua: a mechanism to support portable ontologies , 1991 .

[2]  Derek Leebaert,et al.  The future of the electronic marketplace , 1999 .

[3]  K Luxford.  The Future is Electronic , 1995, Health information management : journal of the Health Information Management Association of Australia.

[4]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Challenger: a multi-agent system for distributed resource allocation , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[5]  Pattie Maes,et al.  A Real-Life Experiment in Creating an Agent Marketplace , 1997, Software Agents and Soft Computing.

[6]  Barry Crabtree,et al.  PAAM 96 : proceedings of the First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology : 22nd-24th April 1996, Westminster Central Hall, London, UK , 1996 .

[7]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Agent-Mediated Integrative Negotiation for Retail Electronic Commerce , 1998, AMET.

[8]  Ioannis S. Terpsidis.  The potential of Electronic Commerce in re-engineering consumer-retailer relationships through Intelligent Agents , 1997 .

[9]  Daniel G. Bobrow,et al.  Book review: The Art of the MetaObject Protocol By Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivieres, Daniel G. and Bobrow(MIT Press, 1991) , 1991, SGAR.

[10]  Marcus Fontoura.  A Systematic Approach for Framework Development , 1999 .

[11]  Robert H. Guttman,et al.  Cooperative vs. Competitive Multi-Agent Negotiations in Retail Electronic Commerce , 1998, CIA.

[12]  Michael R. Genesereth,et al.  Software agents , 1994, CACM.

[13]  Giorgos Zacharia,et al.  Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce: An MIT Media Laboratory Perspective , 2000, Int. J. Electron. Commer..

[14]  Wolfgang Pree,et al.  Design Patterns for Object-Oriented Software Development , 1994, Proceedings of the (19th) International Conference on Software Engineering.

[15]  Timothy W. Finin,et al.  KQML as an agent communication language , 1994, CIKM '94.

[16]  Robert H. Guttman.  Results from a Multi-Agent Electronic Marketplace Experiment , 2001 .

[17]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Kasbah: An Agent Marketplace for Buying and Selling Goods , 1996, PAAM.

[18]  Ralph Johnson,et al.  design patterns elements of reusable object oriented software , 2019 .

[19]  Charles F. Goldfarb,et al.  The XML Handbook , 1998 .

[20]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce : A Survey , 1998 .