Electronic contract negotiation as an application niche for mobile agents

We propose electronic contract negotiation-a sub-part of the more general area of electronic commerce-as an example application for mobile agents. We start by presenting a set of requirements that an application should fulfil in order to take advantage of mobile agents and show that not all distributed applications meet these requirements. We then present contract negotiation, an example of an application that can potentially take full advantage of mobile agents. The paper also contains an introduction to a mobile agent system being developed at Hamburg University and show how it can be used to implement contract negotiation.