Combining Rule-Based and Plug-in Components in Agents for Flexible Dynamic Negotiations

For software agents to become part of e-commerce they have to be flexible—to engage in negotiations of forms which are not known in advance, and mobile—to migrate to remote locations. This note aims at combining flexibility with mobility by joining rule-based mechanism representation with modular mobile agents. Furthermore, we focus on a more complete e-commerce scenario and address questions like: what happens before negotiations start and after they are finished, where from the purchase is actually made etc. Description of agent interactions in such a complete e-commerce scenario is presented.