Applying Mobile Agents to E-business

E-commerce and M-commerce can extend the marketing of a company or enterprise to unlimited region. Through Internet and WWW, the limitation of distance and region are broken for business behaviors. Agent technique is one of the important technologies developed to support the Internet applications. Especially, the Internet and WWW technologies broken the limitation of space, and the agent techniques solve the problems of temporality. Even if the users are off-line, the agents are still active in the world of computer network and play the roles that their users assigned. In this paper, a mechanism is proposed for E-marketplace based on agents and mobile agents. Some issues of research are discussed. They include the platform of mobile agents, the types and classifications of agents and mobile agents, behaviors of commerce transactions and processing models, negotiation mechanisms, etc. Moreover, they include the techniques of information retrieval, data mining, and knowledge base, etc. Based on the proposed mechanism of E-marketplace, the applications of E-commerce will be more effective, easier to develop, and more creating the marketing of business.