Abstract—This paper surveys and analyzes the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) aspects. From the consumer buying behavior perspective, agents are being used in the following activities: need identification, product brokering, buyer coalition formation, merchant brokering, and negotiation. The roles of agents in B2B e-commerce are discussed through the business-to-business transaction model that identifies agents as being employed in partnership formation, brokering, and negotiation. Having identified the roles for agents in B2C and B2B e-commerce, some of the key underpinning technologies of this vision are highlighted. Finally, we conclude by discussing the future directions and potential impediments to the wide-scale adoption of agent-mediated e-commerce. Index Terms—Agent-mediated electronic commerce, intelligent agents. 1

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software engineering.

this paper, we present a framework for a distributed Competitive Attentionspace System, CASy, to allocate the scarce resource that is consumer attention via the techniques of dynamic market-based control [Clearwater 1995; Cheng and Wellman 1998; Gibney et al. 1999] and adaptive software agents [Weiss 1999; Guttman et al. 1998; Kephart et al. 2000]. In the example of an electronic shopping mall, CASy recommends shops to a consumer: the task of matching a consumer to a set of suitable shops is delegated to the individual shops, each of which evaluates the information that is available about the consumer and his or her interests (the consumer's interests and other information which the consumer is willing to provide; e.g. keywords, product queries, and available parts of a profile). Based on this information and on their domain knowledge, shops can make a monetary bid in an auction where a limited amount of consumer attention space, or banners, for the particular consumer is sold. To facilitate CASy, the system is designed as a multi-agent system where each shop is represented by a software agent that executes the task of bidding for the attention of each individual consumer. The use of learning software agents allows shops to rapidly adapt their bidding strategy such that they only bid for consumers that are likely to be interested in their offerings. Furthermore, efficient bidding for each customer is only feasible when automated: hence the use of software agents. These agents allow a shop to process a large number of small transactions, and enable them to make a deliberated bid for every customer entering the shopping mall

The Internet and other new technologies (e.g. agent systems, mobile computing etc.) have created a number of interesting and innovative ways to deliver value to the customer while increasing the income potential of the merchant. Before the year 2000 it was estimated that the Internet connected more than 50 million users

Online travel support systems have often been cited as an ideal proving ground for agent-based architectures, yet no working systems have materialized. Over the last few years we have been considering various aspects of the design of such travel support systems. The aim of this note is to present the current state of our comprehensive framework for delivering personalized travel services using agent infrastructure. 1.

We consider the construction and management of user profiles for an agent-based travel support system, with the goal of providing personalized content for individual users of the system. Profiles consist of statements about the "world of travel." Conditional probabilities for each statement model the strengths of user preferences. These probabilities are derived from implicit and explicit observations of user behavior.

Agent-based systems technologies are of emerging interest in the specification and implementation of complex systems. This article introduces the CASA agent development system which seamlessly combines the BDI (Belief Desire Intention) approach with the FIPA agent communication language standard and an integrated specification of fuzzy controllers. The behavior of agents is defined by strategies which basically correspond to extended guarded horn clauses with priorities. The presented concepts are introduced by an example from Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). The example gives the specification of a fuzzy controller for a manufacturing station in the context of a holonic manufacturing system (HMS).

Information agents process and integrate heterogeneous, distributed information. To achieve this task efficiently, some researchers promote the idea of mobile information agents [13, 53, 44, 20, 10], which migrate between a user's host and other hosts in the network. We outline the concepts behind mobile information agents and give a survey on load balancing, which aims to optimise distributed information processing.

ABSTRACT: Further development of the World Wide Web depends on the existence of data stored in a machine-consumable format. This in turn requires the design of domain ontologies, the availability of information described with these ontologies, and agents for exploiting this information. In this paper we describe our attempt at designing travel ontology and illustrate how our ontology can be used not only to store data in an agent-based travel support system, but also to support delivery of personalized content to users. 1.

Beingpart of a ``learningcommunity' ' requires that knowledge workers keep themselves informed of developments in their area of expertise. However, as we all know, an information saturation problem exists, not least because of the Internet. Modes of informingare specific to each person's concerns, as are the topics they want to be informed about. Libraries and information centers have sought to accommodate this need in the past by promotingCurrent Awareness Services �CAS) and Selective Dissemination of Information �SDI), either through print or electronic means. With the migration of these systems to the Internet, intranet, or corporate portal, it has become the vogue to customize or personalize these access points in accordance with user interests. On the horizon is the promise of intelligent software agents as an additional aid for filtering and retrievinginformation. This article will argue that librarians need to continue embracingthe model principle of CAS, as a tool of relevance, and as a function for remaining visible to their client communities. Electronic access The research register for this journal is available at