Abstract A FACTORY-BASED APPROACH TO SUPPORT E- COMMERCE AGENT FABRICATION.pdf

1 A FACTORY-BASED APPROACH TO SUPPORT E- COMMERCE AGENT FABRICATION Steven Guan, Fangming Zhu and Min-Thein Maung Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering National University of Singapore 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260 Abstract With the development of Internet computing and software agent technologies, agent- based e-commerce is emerging. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become an important issue along the way to success. We propose a factory-based approach to support agent fabrication in e-commerce and elaborate a design based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution Roaming) framework. The details of agent fabrication, modular agent structure, agent life cycle, as well as advantages of agent fabrication are presented. Product-brokering agent is employed as a practical agent type to demonstrate our design and Java-based implementation. Keywords: agent-based e-commerce, agent fabrication, software agents, agent framework 2 1. INTRODUCTION With the dramatic growth of the Internet, electronic commerce (e-commerce) has boomed rapidly. However, there also exist some obstacles to the success of e-commerce. Firstly, buyers may lose their way in the ocean of items available, and likely to miss the best deal. Secondly, it is a tedious task to search for a specific product through the Internet. Thirdly, some tasks, such as negotiation with multiple terms, are so complicated that they are difficult to be dealt with under the current infrastructure. To solve these problems, agent-based e-commerce has thus become a promising technology, within which software agents play a central role [6, 14]. Software agents differ from traditional software in that they possess the properties of pro-activeness, autonomy, and mobility [1, 21]. Therefore, they can carry out delegated tasks in simple, intelligent, and independent manners. They have demonstrated tremendous potential in conducting