Agent Technology in Modelling E-commerce Processes; Sample Implementation

It is often claimed, that intelligent agents are to play an important role in bringing intelligence to the networked world of information. While these claims resurface continually since at least 1994, they do not seem to be substantiated through the development and implementation of large scale agent systems (in terms of both types and sheer number of agents co-existing in the system). While there are a number of possible reasons why this may be the case, in this paper we present an attempt at remedying this situation. We have developed an e-commerce framework and implemented it using the current state-of-the-art agent platform (JADE). This agent framework can be utilized to experiment with development and implementation of distributed intelligence in context of e-commerce scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed tool can be extended to actually model factors pertinent to the world of e-business. In this paper we summarize main features of the developed framework.