Innovations in Software Agent-Based B2B Technologies

In recent years, there has been increasing work where intelligent software agents have been used to support electronic commerce and other Internet-based transactions. This use of agents also called Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, has mostly been seen in areas such as service discovery and knowledge management , automated negotiation and pricing, auctioning and transactional reasoning , and the control of workflow and supply chain management . The vast majority of electronic commerce systems (agent-based or otherwise) have been used to support buying and selling between businesses and consumers (B2C). This trend has carried over into agent research projects that also tend to favor the B2C paradigm. However, an emerging paradigm has arrived where businesses also collaborate on and coordinate transactions over the Internet (B2B). Shortly with the emergence of B2B, equal research efforts will support agents in B2B. In order to transition from B2C to B2B, one must first understand the differing focuses between B2C and B2B. This paper presents the state of the art commercial and research agent-based systems for B2C and B2B. We also present the Agent B2B Evolution Model that forecasts the future construction of agent-oriented B2B systems.