Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Software Agents for Electronic Business: Opportunities and Challenges

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Multi-Agent Systems and Applications II (ACAI 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2322))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Electronic business (eBusiness) is one of the main global drivers of information technology. In this paper, we investigate how eBusiness can benefit from methods, components and solutions based on software agent technology. We give an overview of the current electronic business mainstreams and outline a number of important the challenges eBusiness has to tackle. We then describe how agent technology can be applied to in eBusiness to resolve some of these challenges. We discuss related work and the need for integration of any agent technologies into existing eBusiness landscapes and infrastructures. We describe the opportunities for agent technology in this area. In addition risks and areas of future work are discussed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. APSIG: http://www.objs.com/agent/index.html

  2. Arisha, K., T. Eiter, S. Kraus, F. Ozcan, R. Ross, and V.S. Subrahmanian (1999, March/April). IMPACT: A Platform for Collaborating Agents. IEEE Intelligent Systems 14(2), 64–72

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bauer, B.; Berger, M.: Agent-Based Personal Travel Assistance, Proceedings of International ICSC Symposium on Multi-Agents and Mobile Agents in Virtual Organizations and E-Commerce (MAMA 2000), Wollongong, Australia, 2000

    Google Scholar 

  4. Berger, M, Bauer, B, Watzke, M.: Towards an Agent based Infrastructure for Distributed Virtual Organizations, Proceeding 3rd International WetICE Workshop on Web-Based Infrastructure and Coordination-Architectures for Collaborative Enterprises, MIT, Cambridge, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  5. BizTalk: http://www.biztalk.org

  6. Bussmann, S.: A Multi-Agent Approach to Dynamic, Adaptive Scheduling of Material Flow. MAAMAW 1994: 191–205.

    Google Scholar 

  7. DAML(-OIL): http://www.daml.org

  8. Daniels, M.: Integrating Simulation Technologies with Swarm paper delivered to the “Agent Simulation: Applications, Models and Tools” conference held at University of Chicago in October of 1999, URL http://www.santafe.edu/~mgd/anl/anlchicago.html

  9. Decker, K., K. Sycara, and M. Williamson (1996, December). Matchmaking and Brokering. In International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS96)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Decker, K., K. Sycara, and M. Williamson (1997, August). Middle-agents for the internet. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-97), pp. 578–583.

    Google Scholar 

  11. ebXML http://www.ebxml.org

  12. eCommerce, http://eco.commerce.net

  13. Etzioni, O. Moving Up the Information Food Chain: Deploying Softbots on the World Wide Web. Proceedings of AAAI-96 (Abstract of Invited Talk), 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Fensel D., I. Horrocks, F. Van Harmelen, S. Decker, M. Erdmann and M. Klein: OIL in a nutshell In: Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling, and Management, Proceedings of the European Knowledge Acquisition Conference (EKAW-2000), R. Dieng et al. (eds.), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, LNAI, Springer-Verlag, October 2000

    Google Scholar 

  15. Finin, T. and Fritzson, R.: KQML-a language and protocol for knowledge and information exchange, In Proceedings of the 13th Intl. Distributed Artificial Intelligence Workshop, LNAI 890, Seatle, WA, USA, 1994]

    Google Scholar 

  16. FIPA 97 specification: http://www.fipa.org/repository/fipa97.html

  17. FIPA 98 specification: http://www.fipa.org/repository/fipa98.html

  18. FIPA AGENT: http://www.java-agent.org

  19. FIPA: http://www.fipa.org

  20. Fischer Wirtschaftslexikon.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Fischer, K.: Holonic Multiagent Systems-Theory and Applications. In Proceedings Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA) 1999: 34–48.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Forrester Research: http://www.forrester.com

  23. Frey, R.: Agent technology is making the transition from research labs into industry, invited talk, PAAM 2000, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson R., Vlissides J. Design Patterns, Addison Wesley, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  25. GartnerGroup: http://www.gartner.com

  26. Genesereth, M.R. and R.E. Fikes (1992, June). Knowledge Interchange Format, Version 3.0 Reference Manual. Technical Report Logic-92-1, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/papers/kif.ps

  27. Gerber Ch., B. Bauer, D. Steiner: Resource Adaptation for a Scalable Agent Society, (chapter in) Software Agents for Future Communication Systems, ed. Hayzelden, Bigham, Springer, 1999

    Google Scholar 

  28. Guttman R., A. Moukas, and P. Maes. “Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce: A Survey.” Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 13:3, June 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Ivezic N., Tom Potok, and Line Pouchard. Multiagent Transitional Operations, Autonomous Agents 2000

    Google Scholar 

  30. JADE: http://sharon.cselt.it/projects/jade/

  31. Jennings N. R., K. Sycara, and M.J. Wooldridge. A Roadmap of Agent Research and Development. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. 1(1), pages 7–36. July 1998.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Kuokka, D. (1990). The Deliberative Integration of Planning, Execution, and Learning. Ph.D. thesis, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Kuokka, D. and L. Harada (1996). Integration information via matchmaking. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 6(2/3), 261–279.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. LEAP: http://leap.crm-paris.com

  35. Leonet: http://www.nm.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~leonet

  36. Leonet: http://www.nm.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~leonet

  37. LivingSystems: www.livingsystems.com

  38. LostWax: www.lostwax.com

  39. Maes, P.: Modeling Adaptive Autonomous Agents. In: Langton, C. (ed.): Artificial Life Journal, Vol. 1, No. 182, MIT Press, pp. 135–162, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  40. MASIF: http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?orbos/97-10-05

  41. MoTiV: http://www.motiv.de

  42. Müller, J. P. and M. Pischel. Doing business in the information marketplace: a case study. In Proceedings of the 3rd Intl. Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents-1999), ACM Press, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Müller, J. P. The design of intelligent agents. Lecture Notes of Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1077. Springer-Verlag, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Odell, J. ed., Agent Technology, OMG, green paper produced by the OMG Agent Working Group, 2000

    Google Scholar 

  45. OIL http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil

  46. OMG: http://www.omg.org

  47. Parunak, H. Van Dyke: A Practitioners Review of Industrial Agent Applications. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 3(4): 389–407 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Raymond, E.S. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar-Musings on Linux and Open Source by an accidental Revolutionary”; O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Reeves, D.M., Wellman, M.P., Grosof B.N. Automated negotiation from declarative contract descriptions. In Proceedings of the 5th Intl. Conference on Autonomous Agents, pp. 51–58. ACM Press, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  50. RosettaNet http://www.rosettanet.org

  51. Salton, G. (1989). Automatic Text Processing. Addison-Wesley. (ISBN 0-201-12227-8)

    Google Scholar 

  52. Sandholm, T. eMediator: a next generation electronic commerce server. In Proceedings of the 4th Intl. Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents-2000), pp. 341–348, ACM Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  53. SMIL: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/

  54. SOAP: http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/

  55. SWARM http://www.swarm.org

  56. Sycara, K., J. Lu, M. Klusch, and S. Widoff (1999). Dynamic service matchmaking among agents in open information environments. ACM SIGMOD Record 28(1), Special Issue on Semantic Interoperability in Global Information Systems, 47–53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. UDDI http://www.uddi.org

  58. W3C P3P: www.w3c.org/P3P/

  59. W3C XML Protocol: http://www.w3.org/2000/xp

  60. W3C: www.w3c.org

  61. W3CRDF: http://www.w3c.org/Metadata/

  62. W3CRDFSchema: http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-rdf-schema-20000327/

  63. Wayflow: http://www.wayflow.de

  64. Weinstein, P. and W. Birmingham (1997). Service classification in a proto-organic society of agents. In Proceedings of the IJCAI-97 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Digital Libraries.

    Google Scholar 

  65. Weiss G., Multiagent Systems-A modern approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  66. WSCL: http://www.hp.com/go/e-speak

  67. WSDL: http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl

  68. Wurman P.R., Wellman M.P., Walsh W.E. The Michigan Internet AuctionBot: A configurable auction server for human and software agents. In Proc. Of the 2nd Intl. Conference on Autonomous Agents, pp. 301–308, ACM Press, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  69. XCBL: http://www.xcbl.org

  70. XML: http://www.w3.org/XML/

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, CT IC 6, D-81730, Munich, Germany

    Jörg P. Müller, Bernhard Bauer & Michael Berger

Authors
  1. Jörg P. Müller
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Bernhard Bauer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Michael Berger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Department of Cybernetics, Czech Technical University, 166 27, Prague 6, Czech Republic

    Vladimír Mařík , Olga Štěpánková  & Hana Krautwurmová ,  & 

  2. Rockwell Automation Research Center Prague, Americka 22, 120 00, Prague 2, Czech Republic

    Vladimír Mařík

  3. Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

    Michael Luck

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Müller, J.P., Bauer, B., Berger, M. (2002). Software Agents for Electronic Business: Opportunities and Challenges. In: Mařík, V., Štěpánková, O., Krautwurmová, H., Luck, M. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Applications II. ACAI 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2322. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45982-0_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45982-0_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43377-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45982-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation