An Agent-Mediated Transaction Center for Electronic Marketplace

• Main Authors: An-Cheng Cheng, 鄭安成
• Other Authors: Chi-Ming Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12633749897577844889

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 資訊工程學系 === 89 === With the rapid development of internet technologies, information exchange became much easier. Many industries want to take advantage of internet technologies, especially in business, for example electronic commerce. The development of electronic commerce needs many kinds of techniques to support such as mobile agents. Mobile agents are mobile, personalized, autonomous, and adaptive. These qualities make mobile agents useful for the information-rich and communication-rich environment such as electronic commerce. The way of building an online shopping market which is most used in common commerce sites has two main drawbacks: 1. Because of the different product data format in database and representation, it is difficult to exchange information between the two online markets. 2. Consumers must search and filter product information by browsing a lot of shopping sites and have to compare the product prices by themselves. To solve problems described above, using mobile agent technologies is the best solution. Mobile agents can move from one site to another site, and execute specified tasks, but the precodition is that the shopping sites must provide an environment in which mobile agents can execute and mechanisms that bring mobile agents into full play. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to build an agent-mediated transaction center of electronic marketplace. The transaction center sets up transaction mechanisms. Followed these mechanisms, mobile agents on behalf of buyer or seller can trade in electronic marketplace. The transaction center also uses functional agents to provide various services. There are four main services provided by the transaction center: information query, brokering, transaction, and transaction committing. Information query service lets buyers or sellers query various product and market information. Brokering service provide buyers or sellers a suggestion list that recommends them suitable objects. Transaction mechanism provides buyers or sellers two ways to trade. One is one-to-one negotiation and the other is auction. Transaction committing service records agreements that buyers and sellers reached. Electronic market will be the trusted third party. Transaction center is composed of several functional agents, it make electronic market not only automatic but also flexible and extensible.