Distributed Models for Brokerage on Electronic Commerce

With the development of Electronic Commerce (EC), the need of offering brokerage facilities in a distributed environment has arisen. Customers need, in many situations, systems (broker agents) that simplify them the access to the different products and services provided by suppliers. On the other hand, the existence of brokers increases the globality of EC, since customers are even more unaware of the location of their final goods providers. To help on this, several brokerage systems are being developed in different contexts. However, how to organise broker agents in a distributed EC environment is not always being approached in the same way. This paper concentrates on this problem, and considers the different work in the field currently going on. A special focus is made on European research projects. This paper proposes several distributed models for Electronic Commerce, focussing on the case when brokerage facilities are included. In particular, we are proposing different models, i.e. a functional model, and operational model and an architectural model. In order to show the feasibility of the models, how they are applied to a specific implementation is shown.