We report in this paper on a project dealing with the development of an XML-based tool for the management of the communication infrastructure within an e-commerce system. The major aim is to be able to simulate any given infrastructure prior to its implementation in order to detect potential problems early in a cost-effective way. We are focusing mainly on security problems that may arise. From...

With the development of Internet computing and software agent technologies, agent-based electronic commerce (e-commerce) is emerging. Software agents have demonstrated tremendous potential in conducting various tasks in e-commerce. However, when agents are initially created, they have little knowledge and experience with relatively lower capability. They should also strive to adapt themselves t...

Information commerce (i-commerce) is a special variant of e-commerce in which the goods being offered for sale are digital and thus amenable to processing by computers. Trading of digital goods opens up new business opportunities and also poses interesting software engineering challenges. We present a general model of information commerce that extends the traditional customer-vendor model with ...

This paper presents an aspect of the ongoing research at the University of Michigan aiming to analyze the status of e-commerce in the construction industry. It identifies impediments and challenges, and research solutions for the identified challenges. The focus is on risk management and legal challenges for e-commerce in construction. Very little, if any, research exists on this area in constr...

Conventional mechanisms for electronic commerce provide strong means for securing transfer of funds, and for ensuring such things as authenticity and non-repudiation. But they generally do not attempt to regulate the activities of the participants in an e-commerce transaction, treating them, implicitly, as autonomous agents. This is adequate for most cases of client-to-vendor commerce, but is q...

In recent years electronic commerce has been at the centre of interest of many companies and also of many researchers. See the International Journal on Electronic Commerce (IJEC) for current research topics and e.g. (Kalakota and Whinston 1996, Kalakota and Robinson 2001) for an overview. However, after a period of a growing world economy in which electronic commerce was advocated as one of the...

Current web-based commerce is by and large a replica of real-world commerce. Customers are supposed to visit various electronic storefronts, inspect the digital displays of goods and services, and, perhaps after some comparison shopping, place an order. Unfortunately they have to do it in person. Attempts at supporting the customer through \intelligent agents" are guaranteed to be in vain, unle...

Mobile agent technology has become a new paradigm for distributed real-time systems because of their inherent advantages. In any distributed system, along with other issues, survivability and fault tolerance are vital issues for deploying mobile-agent systems. E-business becoming a prominent domain for deploying agent technology, it also faces reliability problems due to the failure of agent pl...