MOBILE AGENT IN E-COMMERCE

Mohamed Elkobaisi

Academy of Graduate Studies, Benghazi, Libya

Keywords: Mobile Agent, E-commerce.

Abstract: Agent can be enhancing company modelling as well as to offer new techniques for developing intelligent

applications. The key aspects of e-commerce agents are their autonomy, their mobility, their abilities to

perceive, reason, and act in their surrounding environments, as well as the capability to cooperate with other

agents to solve complex problems. Autonomy of agents involves adaptability to engage in negotiations

governed by mechanisms not known in advance, while their mobility entails such negotiations taking place

at remote locations. This paper aims at combining adaptability with mobility, by describing of agents

appearing in the system and their basic interactions. Furthermore, this paper discusses the reasons why use

of mobile agents within suggested system.

1 INTRODUCTION

Fundamentally, the system represents a distributed

marketplace that hosts e-Suppliers and allows e-

Buyers to “visit” them to purchase products. There

are six different agents involved in the system which

are (Supplier, Storehouse, Seller, Monitor, Buyer,

and Registration Agent “RA”). The conceptual

architecture of the system illustrating proposed types

of agents and their interactions in a particular

configuration is shown in Figure 1.

Let us now describe each agent appearing in that

figure and their functionalities. Supplier and the

Buyer agents represent system “users” — merchants

that sell products and buyers who want to purchase

them. Buyer agents (Visitors) have the option to

negotiate with the Suppliers, to bid for products and

to choose the Supplier from which to make a

purchase. The first step in the system, Buyer agents

user requests. RA is work as librarian that makes the

system easier and faster for buyer and supplier

because in the large companies and enterprises "The

time is money". Similarly, Supplier agents create

Monitor agents and register them with the RA.

Furthermore, each Supplier agent registers there all

products that are available in its e-store (an initial

list of available products). In this way, the RA store

information (addresses and identifiers) about all

Supplier, Monitor and Buyer agents existing in the

system, and store information about available

products, see also (Trastour,2002). The following

Sequence diagram explains the interactions among

Human Buyer, Buyer Agent, RA, and Supplier

agent, see figure (2). On the other hand, on supply

side, Supplier agents are responsible for creating

Seller agents (one for each product to be sold), each

Seller agents playing exactly the same role.

Buyer agents seek to the best possible offer

matching user-specified requirements. Buyer agents

engage in price negotiations and gathers offers and

decides where from to attempt at making an actual

Buyer

Storehou

Seller

onitor

Buyer

Supplier

Buyer movement

Figure 1: Architectural of the System.

177

Elkobaisi M. (2006).

MOBILE AGENT IN E-COMMERCE.

In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 177-180

DOI: 10.5220/0002440101770180

 SciTePress

purchase or decides that purchase that would satisfy

its user cannot be made. Finally, in addition to

agents proposed, Storehouse agents, also created by

Supplier agents (one such agent for every e-store in

the system). Storehouse agents are responsible for:

management of products available for sale, and

management of reserved products, see figure (3).

Figure 2: Sequence diagram for system interactions.

Supplier

Monitor StorehouseSeller

4: Release Buyers

5: Negotiate with Buyers

1:information (products , quantities)

6: Waiting for Seller notification

7: Inform (negotiations Result)

8: Reserve a given quantity

10: Waiting Storehous response

12: Cancel the reservation

(purchase rejected )

11: The Response

3: Filling list of Buyers

Figure 3: Sequence Diagram for supplying state.

2 THE ELEMENTS OF THE

SYSTEM

Supplier Agent:

The Supplier agent acts as the representative of the

“user”. The Supplier agent creates Monitor agent, a

Storehouse agent and Seller agents. The creation of

the Storehouse agent involves passing information

about goods that are available for sale, while

creation of the Monitor and Seller agents involves

providing them with information that are to be used

in price negotiations. After creation, the Supplier

agent supervises negotiations and the product flow.

If they were successful, Seller agent informs the

Supplier agent, which asks the Storehouse agent to

reserve a given quantity of a particular product (for a

specific amount of time). The events can then

proceed according to three different cases. (1) If the

winning Buyer confirms purchase the Supplier asks

the Storehouse agent to check the reservation. If the

reservation did not expire then the Supplier informs

the Buyer agent about acceptance of transaction. (2)

If the reservation has expired, then the Supplier

agent sends a rejection message to the Buyer agent.

(3) If the Buyer agent rejects purchase and informs

the Supplier agent about it, the Supplier agent asks

the Storehouse agent to cancel the reservation.

Figures 4: State diagram of the Supplier agent.

Monitor agent:

The Supplier agents cooperate directly with Monitor

agents that: (1) Interact with Buyer agents: Admit

them to the negotiations and provide them with

important information about current negotiation. (2)

In suitable moments release Buyer agents to

appropriate Sellers. (3) Creates and update a register

list that contains all current Buyer agents. The state

diagram of the Monitor agent is presented in Figure

5 (the high level of Monitor functionality) and

continued in Figure 6 (detailing prepare to

negotiation). When an appropriate number of Buyer

agents have registered, the Monitor passes their

identifiers to the Seller agents and thus allows the

negotiation to start. As soon as this step is

completed, the Monitor cleans the list of registered

Buyer agents and the admission/monitor process is

restarted (assuming that the Seller agent is still

alive). When new Buyer agents are delivered, a list

of currently registered Buyer agents are put into a

buffer “Buffer registration list”. These agents have

to be serviced first.

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Figure 5: State diagram of the Monitor agent.

Figure 6: State diagram (Prepare to Negotiation).

Finally, in a special case when a given product has

been sold-off and will not be replenished, the

Supplier agent terminates the Seller responsible for

selling it and the Monitor informs awaiting Buyer

agents about this fact.

Storehouse Agent:

The Supplier agent interacts directly also with the

Storehouse agent. In the early stages of its

functioning the Storehouse agent is supplied

(through messages from the Supplier agent) with

information about products and their quantities.

Then the Storehouse agent awaits notifications from

the Supplier agent. The Supplier agent notifies the

Storehouse agent about: (1) Registration of new

products for sale. (2) Product reservations.

(3)Purchase confirmations.

(4)Purchase terminations. If reserved products

whose reservation time has expired are found, these

reservations are cancelled, reserved products are

added to the pool of products available for sale and

the Supplier agent is informed about a new amount

of available commodities. Note that the information

about cancelled reservation is provided to the

Supplier agent only when a purchase is requested by

the Buyer agent and the Supplier agent is checking if

a transaction can be completed. Finally, if quantity

of some product becomes 0, the Storehouse agent

informs about it the Supplier agent, which may

decide to terminate the corresponding Seller agent.

In this case it informs about it both the RA and the

Storehouse agents, see figures (5, 6).

Seller agent:

Finally, Seller agent is the last agent working on the

supply side of the system that appears to be a simple.

This simplicity comes form the fact it has no

complex interactions. Note that not all negotiations

have to end by establishing a winner and the system

is able to handle such an event.

At the same time, all data about negotiations is

sending to the Supplier agent that collects and

analyses them. Obviously, another aspect of

autonomy involves “intelligence” that can be

understood as capability to reason over past

experiences and domain knowledge in order to

maximize utility.

Finally, the final stage in the system called “Sale

finalization” which includes such actions as payment

and delivery no represent in the system.

Waiting for start negotiations

waiting for msgs

update quantity

Suplier msg

Buyer msg

finalization of negetiations

There is no Buyer [ restart timer]

There is no winnerThere is a winner

Figure 7: State diagram of the Seller agent.

Buyer agent:

Finally, on the purchasing side, the Buyer agent (that

is a mobile) listens for orders from the customer and,

to fulfill them:

(1) Queries the RA which stores sell the requested

product. (2) Communicates with the Monitor agent

see Figures (5, 6) to obtain entry to the negotiations.

(3) Manages the process of making purchases on

behalf of the customer, then the Buyer agent informs

the customer about the results of price negotiations.

For a specific amount of time and when the wait-

time is over the Buyer agent enters a complex state:

- Attempt to complete a selected purchase.

- Cancel the existing reservations and re-engage in

price negotiations (thus awaiting a better

opportunity).

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179

- Declare the purchase impossible and notify the

customer accordingly, see figure (8).

When the attempt at completing a purchase is

successful, then the Buyer agent sends messages to

customer. The situation is slightly more complicated

when the attempt was unsuccessful and purchase

was not deemed impossible. Then the Buyer agent

cancels current reservations and return to price

negotiations.

Figure 8: State diagram of the Buyer agent.

3 WHY MOBILE AGENT IN THE

SYSTEM?

Scripts The agent mobility in E-commerce system

plays an important role and provides significant

benefits. Let us start by considering someone who,

sitting behind a slow Internet connection (which is

not an uncommon situation), tries to participate in an

E-auction (Bejar & Juan, 2001). In this case it is

almost impossible to be sure that ones bid:

(1) Reaches E-auction server in time (Tamma et al

2002). (2) Is sufficiently large to outbid opponents

that have been bidding while connected over a fast

link (information about auction progress as well as

our responses may not be able to reach their

destinations sufficiently fast). Here, network-caused

delays can be significant for the outcome of

negotiations (purchase of the desired product may be

prevented).

Obviously, problems described here can be avoided

if an agent representing user is located at the same

server where the negotiations take place with assume

that an agent is capable of autonomously completing

the requested task (Artikis et al, 2001); resulting in

offers being made fast enough to efficiently

participate in price negotiations.

4 CONCLUSION

This paper discusses ecommerce agent system that

uses mobile agent technologies for implementing

flexible automated negotiations. After presenting an

overview of the proposed system by using UML

diagrams, the attention is focused on questions

involved in agent mobility. I have argued that agent

mobility is the most optimal solution for the e-

commerce model considered here. Finally I have

discussed why there is no simple solution to the

problem of finding the optimal offer when multiple

agents negotiate prices within multiple e-stores and

thus why this solution is as optimal as any other.

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