Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Role of
Software Agents
in
E-Commerce
Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Table of Contents
Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 4
What is E-Commerce ................................................................................................................. 5
What are Software Agents? ....................................................................................................... 6
Types of Software Agent ........................................................................................................... 7
Literature Review and Survey ................................................................................................. 10
Role of Software agents in E-Commerce................................................................................. 11
Technology used for Software Agents ..................................................................................... 13
Benefits of Software Agents in E-Commerce Industry ........................................................... 14
Conclusion or Result ................................................................................................................ 15
Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Abstract
This paper states how software agents will influence the present marketing prototype in

interactive media. It focuses on the importance of these in E-Commerce. E-Commerce is a

platform for the online activities of commerce, increase in the activities of trade in

cyberspace increases the business opportunities over internet. Software agents are the useful

tools to help individuals to undertake their activities on E-Commerce surroundings. Software

agents create different paths for communication. Software agents increase the effectiveness

and efficiency in several levels of market processes. The agent technology builds the bridge

between the previously existing physical market and consequences of virtual markets.

Software agents will have dramatic competition effects by quick transfer of information

through new technology. As the name indicates software agents acts as mediators for the

processes of choosing products and merchants. Overall software agents act as a vehicle

between E-Commerce and business.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Introduction
Greater portion of daily activities such as shopping, socializing, and working are being

transferred to the internet environment. Over the past few decades, human computer

interaction, and electronic transactions are being used. Individual’s online activities are

getting more and more complex with growing opportunities of internet environment. The

internet that has grown dramatically in the past few years would by now becomes

unmanageable without E-Commerce for business. It is claimed that within the next decade

the internet could be populated with billions of agents exchanging information, goods and

services with one another and with the people.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

What is E-Commerce
Modern methodology of news selling and merchandising tools that refers to the need of

market by cost reduction in turns giving quality goods and services. E-commerce means

doing business over interconnected networks. The term commerce is treated as transactions

between business clients. So the meaning Electronic Commerce is narrow to some people

thus there is a usage of term E-Business. But E-Commerce is not just buying and selling but

also providing services to the clients and providing both inter and intra transactions of

information in the organization irrespective of the type of company. This extended use of

internet for trade and business led to the use of software agents in E-Commerce.
Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

What are Software Agents?

Although the theory of agents stated that agent is given a very famous with the growth of

internet. Software agents are a piece of software which works for the user. However, software

agent is not just a program. An agent is a system situated within and a part of an environment

that senses that environment and acts on it. Over time in pursuit of its own agenda and so as

to effect what it senses in the future? Important use of agent concept is, as the tool for

analysis not as dosage.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Types of Software Agent

Agents are classified into different types based on the characteristics they possess. In order to

possess the above properties agents must have distinct features such as locomotion,

integration, co-operation, information, stimulation, etc. For the same sake software agents are

classified into 8 agents.

Collaborative agents: A collaborative agent is a software program that helps users solve

problem, especially in complex or unfamiliar domains by correcting errors, suggesting what

to do next, and taking care of low-level details. Collaborative agents are also refereed as

collagen. In spite of their behaviour of autonomy, cooperation, and learning, collagen

punctuate the first two behaviours. In order to perform these, they have to agree on

acceptable protocols.

Interface agents: Interface agents are computer programs that employ machine learning

techniques in order to provide assistance to a user dealing with a particular application (Maes,

1994b). These agents take sufficient amount of time to understand and learn human

behaviour before they are onto work. In spite of their artificial learning thoughts they are

limited co-operative with other agents.

Mobile agents: A mobile agent is an executing program that can migrate during execution

from one machine to another in a heterogeneous network. Mobile agents are used to solve

many problems of network computing with minimum bandwidth and connectivity. The theme

behind these agents is, „give program the ability to move.

The main advantage of mobile agent over stationery agent are:

(a)This is not bound to the system where it begins execution.

(b) Can move from one system to another within the network.

(c) Both the state and code is transported.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Information/Internet agents: The intelligent part of software which can automatically

search for information on the website is termed as information agents. Information system

can be considered as knowledge base system. These agents are defined by what they do

unlike collaborative agents or interface agents which are defined by what they are.

Reactive agents: These agents are responsible for stimulating the response to the present

state of the environment in which they are embedded. These agents interact with other agents

in a very simple and basic way. The important things which support reactive agents. (maes

1991)

(a) There is no prior specification of the behaviour of these agents set since the dynamic

interaction leads to the emergent complexity.

(b) Reactive agents are responsible for collection of modules which operate autonomously.

(c) Reactive agents tend to operate on representations which are close to raw sensor data.

(d) Intelligent behaviour is the interaction of these agents with their environment.

(a) Hybrid agents: Combining two or more of the previous mentioned agent philosophies

will yield a better functioning agent. E.g.: Synergy of reactive and collaborative model. The

expectation is that this hypothesis will come true.

(b) Heterogeneous agents: These agent systems unlike hybrid, refers to an integrated set up

of at least two or more agents which belong to two or more different agent classes. These

may also contain two or more hybrid agents.

(c) Smarts agents: The smart agents are the new form of software agents that interface with

other agents forming an artificial intelligence. SMART stands for System for Managing

Agents for Real Time. The key concept lies here is not the entire individual agent need be
Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

intelligent. But by working together in a smart way the agents form a type of emergent

intelligence that may appears to exhibit intelligence.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Literature Review and Survey

There are several experimental agent projects at HP Labs in Palo Alto and Bristol, focusing

on Ecommerce and application management. Agents include standard libraries of

measurement objects and methods to initiate, change, and dynamically update measurement.

(See http://beast.cs.utah.edu). They have implemented a light-weight, dynamic agent

infrastructure in Java (Chen, 1998, 1999), used for data mining and dynamic workflow

integration and provisioning. Dynamic agents support “on demand”. Several projects have

focused on the agent mediated E-commerce, looking at negotiation in task allocation (Priest

1999), implementing a new facilitator architecture (Pearson, 1997), and playing a key role in

the FIPA97 ACL specification.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Role of Software agents in E-Commerce

Virtual systems are the decentralized business networks which work in the flexible. To have

efficient operation and productivity of the virtual organizations, must be able to

communicate, Co-operate and Co-ordinate (the 3Cs of business) with each other. Software

agents are effective tool to virtual organizations since they provide mechanisms to automate

several activities like, gathering the data, refining the information, negotiate the business

deals and also intelligent agents work like human beings in supplying and buying goods

which have the artificial machine knowledge. Software have variety of applications which

includes, B2B which stands for Business to Business, E-Commerce, Internet based

information systems, robotics, smart systems, data mining and Knowledge discovery. Agent

technology also helps in finding intranet or internet, Customer relation management, supply

chain management and market pricing.

The reason behind the use of Software Agents are mentioned below:

1. Software Agents and Mobility: Mobile agents are a kind of software agent that represent

a revolution in how programs are distributed, run and server resources shared and how

computer users interact with online services. They can act on the behalf of their principals

autonomously while performing their actions in some of level of pro-activity and reactivity.

2. Coping with Emergencies: There are situations where people, organizations or the

computer systems will undergo stress. During this stage mostly they fail to take quick actions

which are common or daily tasks. For an individual, if there are some natural problems like

death in the family, illness, or job problem etc. they fail to take care of simple thing like

paying phone bill or electricity bill etc. For these kinds of problems, it is not the solution to

have an automated system.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Dynamic Distributed systems are Software agents provide a better figure for utilizing

parallelism and dynamics of Computer networks which increases the usage of the available

networks. Software agents give an ideal figure out for distributed computing.

3. A software agent is a software entity that acts with autonomy to accomplish tasks on behalf

of its users. They function continuously and autonomously in a particular environment, often

inhabited by other agents of processes. The idea here is the use of software agents for

collaboration.

4. Life agents: Life agents are software agents that are initiated and run in the background

and act directly or indirectly on the client's side automatically, monitoring the progress over

the period of time.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Technology used for Software Agents

The idea behind is to enable the intelligent agent as an instantly connected computing service

on the network. The use of WWW i.e. World wide web provides robustness and scalability of

web servers; access of firewalls will also become easier. Since Intelligent Software Agents

(ISAs) include problem domains that require human-like intelligence processing automated

they need to have artificial human like intelligence. In order to process this, they need the

knowledge of the techniques like Artificial Intelligence, Pattern recognition, neural networks,

embedded systems, and similarly such high-end knowledge. Software agents provides great

promise to build loosely-coupled, dynamically adaptive systems on increasingly pervasive

message-based middleware, P2P and component technology, Java, XML (Extensible Mark-

up Language), SOAP (Service Oriented Application), HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up

Language), HTTP (Hyper Text transfer protocol) and CGI (Common gateway interface) etc.

It can be seen that the knowledge of software engineering and enterprise modelling is also

required for software agents.

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Benefits of Software Agents in E-Commerce Industry

[1] Agents make less work for the end user and application developer.

[2] The agent can adapt to its user preferences and habit over a course of time.

[3] It will intelligently get shared among the community.

[4] Mobile agents manage the user’s E-mail, fax, phone and pager as well as linking the user

to Telescriptenabled messaging and communication services such as America Online and

AT&T Personal ink Services.

[5] The most favourite area with respect to reactive agents is games and entertainment

industry.

[6] Shopping agents are ideal applications of Agent Builder agents. These agents can be used

to locate

[7] merchandise, compare prices, place orders, etc. Intelligent Software agents will have

numerous applications in the field of human like intelligence capabilities which is a area of

research being done in Artificial Intelligence.

Some of the applications are:

[1] Logical Inference and Deduction

[2] Contextual Domain Knowledge

[3] Pattern Recognition

[4] Learning and Adaptively

Role Of Software Agents in E-Commerce

Conclusion or Result
After studying the characteristics of software agents’ different conclusions were drawn that

software agents are quite flexible enough to adopt and adjust themselves into changes.

Software agents provide security to the information as well. Since E-commerce deal with

business online, security is the top most priority for the merchant as well as the consumers. E-

Commerce business requires lots of communication skills which is provided by software

agents. Software agents are responsible for customer satisfaction in terms of B2B (i.e.

Business to Business) E-commerce. Software agents can be thus proved as an important

entity with respect to E-Commerce. Without Software agents E-Commerce is like “a man

having his leg cut”.