Cooperative multi-agent negotiation for electronic commerce based on mobile agents

Over the past few years, electronic commerce has been developed prosperously. Agents are utilized to develop automatic commerce environments in order to improve the trade performance between buyers and suppliers. Besides, mobile agents provide more efficient performance in the Internet through the mobility of traveling in the network. This paper proposes a distributed electronic-marketplace (e-Marketplace) system based on mobile agents. In this system, a buyer dispatched agents to search the product information, travel to the supplier sides, and negotiate with the suppliers' agents. In order to work efficiently, an asynchronous cooperative mechanism for the negotiation was developed. The dispatched multiple agents collaborated together to negotiate with the suppliers' agents for the best quotation. Implementation for the mobile agent utilized IBM's Aglets Software Development Kit. A tourism application was developed for demonstrating the proposed distributed e-marketplace system. Experimental results showed that the proposed system and underlying mechanisms performed effectively and efficiently.