Abstract Abstract of Thesis Entitled 'design and Implementation of the Consumer Buying Process for Mobile Agent-based Internet Commerce System (magics)'

of thesis entitled ‘Design and Implementation of the Consumer Buying Process for Mobile AGent-based Internet Commerce System (MAGICS)’ submitted by Perry Pui Yi Lam for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in October 2004. With the advent of software agent technologies, there has been considerable interest in the development of agent-based e-commerce systems. Agents can make a computer system more effective because they can perform tasks autonomously. To complement current Web-based Internet commerce systems and particularly to support consumer-oriented e-commerce, we have developed a mobile agent-based e-commerce system called Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Mobile AGent-based Internet Commerce System (MAGICS). This project focuses on using B2C MAGICS to facilitate the consumer buying process. Consumers can use B2C MAGICS through a proxy server via a Web/WAP interface. In accordance with user requirements, agents are sent to obtain responses from sellers. The best seller is chosen based on these responses and an agent is sent to carry out the transaction. To complete these tasks, the agents need to exchange many messages. In this thesis, we develop an Extensible Markup Language (XML) scheme for inter-agent communications in which agents communicate through MAGICS messages which are specified by an XML schema. A MAGICS message consists of three kinds of information: basic,