S ftware Agents in Electronic Commerce: An Overview

The explosive growth of Internet-based electronic commerce has increased the consumer’s choices of goods and merchants. To find a suitable good and merchant with acceptable sales terms is a very tedious task. Agent technologies promise to simplify these tasks for consumers. This chapter presents an overview of electronic commerce systems based on software agent technology. A survey of current existing and prototype systems are presented. One of essential requirements of a successful e-commerce system is security measurement. This paper also discusses security issues related to implementing agent-based ecommerce. INTRODUCTION Electronic commerce stems from the demand within business and government to make better use of computer technology to improve customer interaction, business processes and information exchange both within an enterprise and across enterprises. In the early days of electronic commerce, the emphasis was placed more on information exchanges within and across enterprises or business-to-business electronic commerce through the use of EDI. There have been some reservations expressed by the business community, especially small businesses, regarding EDI solutions in electronic commerce. The main reservations result from the high costs associated with developing EDI and limited interaction with customers. The latter point shows that there is little support for customer-to-business electronic commerce. In order to support the customer-to-business model, a different technology is required. Such an alternative technology is provided by the Internet technology. The maturity of Internet technology has opened opportunities for businesses to develop customer-to-business electronic commerce. Indeed, this type of commerce has grown rapidly in the last few years. Forrester Research estimates that Internet-generated transactions will grow exponentially from a combined worth of about US $14 billion in 1997 to US $327 billion within five years (Ma, 1999). This figure shows that there is still around This chapter appears in the book, Internet Commerce and Software Agents: Cases, Technologies and Opportunities by Syed Mahbubur Rahman and Robert J. Bignall. Copyright © 2001, Idea Group Publishing. 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Hershey PA 17033-1117, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com ITB8013 IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING