Electronic commerce is a rapidly growing area accompanied by the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web. As information on the Internet becomes more dynamic and heterogeneous , `software agents' have been touted as the new building blocks for a new Internet structure. We foresee a future whereby the Web is populated with as many software agents (involved in electronic commerce and other ...

In the last decade, agent-based e-commerce has emerged as a potential role for the next generation of e-commerce. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become a serious consideration in this field. This paper proposes a new scheme named agent fabrication and elaborates its implementation in multi-agent systems based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) arc...

Mobile phone usage and its adoption have been growing at exponential rates. It is this exponential growth rate that has led many to predict Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) as the next major evolution of Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce). While M-Commerce comes rich with unique features, it is currently lacking in usage when compared to traditional e-commerce. There are many challenges that must be ...

A vital requirement for e-commerce today is privacy. We explore the area of privacy for Agents in the Privacy Incorporated Software Agent (PISA) project. We first review existing privacy protection techniques: pseudonym systems, privacy enhancing technology (PET) and anonymous communication networks. We then propose a model for an Anonymous Internet Infrastructure (AII), an anonymous Internet b...

With the increasing importance of EC (Electronic Commerce) across the Internet, the need for agents to support both customers and suppliers is growing rapidly. But the lack of standard on product ontology, message and negotiation protocol between agents and brokering makes full automation of EC infeasible. In this paper, we describe an open infrastructure for agentbased EC and design a virtual ...

Around the world, mobile commerce (m-commerce) is being rapidly adopted as the latest trend to do business. This study aims to explore the environmental factors affecting m-commerce adoption by telecommunication firms in Jordan. A framework was developed based on the literature review, consisting of nine factors that are used to examine their effect on the m-commerce adoption level. The quantit...

Agent technologies are now being considered for automating tasks in e-commerce applications. However, conventional software agents with predefined functions, but without the ability to modify behavior dynamically, may be too limited for mediating E-Commerce applications properly, since they cannot switch roles or adjust their behavior to participate in dynamically formed partnerships. We have d...

One of our goals when building the University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL) has been to prototype an architecture that can continually recon gure itself as users, contents, and services come and go. We have worked toward this goal by developing a multi-agent infrastructure with agents that buy and sell services from each other using our commerce and communication protocols. We refer to the...

Since searching, sorting and filtering of information nowadays becomes more and more important, the demand for supportive autonomous, mobile and intelligent software agents is steadily increasing. For fast and efficient implementation of agents there needs to be a powerful infrastructure supporting collaboration and coordination between agents. While developing such a powerful distributed infra...