An intelligent shopping system based on multi-agent collaborative working model

This paper proposes an agent-based shopping system for electronic commerce. The aim of it is to automate shopping process by assisting customers to have commodity information retrieval and comparison in the massive information environment of the Internet. Based on the agent technology, the shopping system comprises multi-attribute evaluation model and preference evaluation model. The system consists of five types of agents that can interact with each other: interface agent, buyer manager, buyer agent, evaluation agent and preference agent. These agents collaborate with each other by the message delivery mechanism and make the whole system works together. The system framework has been built adopting the technology of the software reuse, thus promoting the reuse of each agent component. The paper discusses the characteristic of the framework and compares the system with other shopping system. The conclusions show that the system performs efficiently and can help customers save enormous time for Internet shopping.