Jade Based Multi - Agent E - Commerce Environment : Initial Implementation

Recent advances in software engineering, business process management and computational intelligence resulted in methods and techniques for developing advanced e-commerce applications as well as supporting automating e-commerce business processes. Despite this fact, up to now, the most successful e-commerce systems are still based on humans to make the most important decisions in various activities within an e-business transaction. In this context, development of automatic negotiations is one of the most important research issues. While, depending on the type of the transaction, different negotiation procedures could be utilized, only few proposed frameworks are generic and flexible enough to handle multiple scenarios. On the other hand, agent technology is often claimed to be the best approach for automating e-commerce business processes (including price negotiations). However, it is difficult to find successful large-scale agent-based e-commerce applications to confirm this claim. This paper presents negotiating agents that change their negotiation protocol and strategy through dynamic loading of negotiation modules. These, as well as other agents of different types and playing different roles have been implemented to in*Gizycko Private Higher Educational Institute, Department of Informatics, ul. Daszynskiego 9, 11-500 Gizycko, Poland [email protected] **Oklahoma State University, Computer Science Department Tulsa, OK, 74106, USA and SWPS, Computer Science ul. Chodakowska 19/31, 03-815 Warszawa, Poland [email protected] *** SoftExpert SRL, Str.Vasile Conta, bl.U25, Craiova, Romania, [email protected] **** University of Craiova, Software Engineering Department, Bvd.Decebal 107, Craiova, RO-200440, Romania, badica [email protected] *****School of Computer Science and Engineering, Chung Ang University, Seoul, Korea, [email protected]