CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE AND SAMPLE IMPLEMENTATION OF A MULTI-AGENT E-COMMERCE SYSTEM

Recent advances in software engineering, business process management and computational intelligence resulted in methods and techniques for developing advanced e-commerce applications as well as supporting automating e-commerce business processes. Despite this fact, up to now, the most successful e-commerce systems are still based on human input to make the most important decisions in various activities along the lifecycle of an e-business transaction. Our work aims at bridging the gap between these two scenarios (the possible and the real), by proposing a conceptual architecture of a multi-agent e-commerce system. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated with a sample implementation, using a state-of-the-art agent platform – JADE.