As the Internet grows, it is becoming less feasible for customers and merchants to manually visit each web site, analyze the information there, and make sound business decisions regarding the trading of goods or services. To cope with this evolution, software agents can be designed that are capable of automating the more routine, tedious, and time-consuming tasks involved in current trading processes. At a higher level agents may also be able to negotiate and make autonomous decisions and commitments on behalf of their owners.
This paper describes an agent implementation using the situation calculus, which offers a possibly unifying paradigm for dynamic agents. Interesting applications are currently being developed. Our contribution is a situation calculus agent system developed for e-business. Ongoing work is focused on implementing this system in an open marketplace environment.
The Internet can be viewed as a large, distributed information resource, with connecting systems that are designed and implemented by many different organizations with various goals and agendas. Because of the breadth and flexibility of the Internet, e-business applications have grown rapidly in recent years, and this trend is expected to continue. Forrester Research and the Gartner Group estimate that e-business transactions will exceed $7 trillion by 2004. Thirty-seven percent of these transactions are estimated to be associated with electronic marketplaces, which provide resources to facilitate the interaction and exchange of commerce transactions among buyers, sellers, and other trading partners (Rahman & Bignall, 2001).
Today's e-business is increasingly characterized by the ability to create value through the gathering, synthesizing, and distribution of information. E-businesses progressively compete in real time rather than cycle time and operate through a constantly responsive dialogue with their customers and markets. Relationships among customers and markets are managed by technology through electronic channels. These technology-mediated channels are characterized by ongoing operations, which are subjected to measurement and tracking in new and innovative ways (Evans & Wurster, 2000).
Such applications are being facilitated by e-business architectures that provide opportunity for distributed, service-based applications, where service providers may not know about each other at design time. Services include such components as credit card charging, final fulfillment of orders, or publication of product information. These services are often distributed and run on different computers in geographically dispersed locations. Generally, services are created and offered by separate businesses, which specialize in a particular type of service. Such entities can often achieve economies of scale and provide levels of service beyond what a firm may be able to provide internally. This environment offers new opportunities for online business advantage.
Yet as the Internet grows in size and sophistication, it is becoming less feasible for customers and merchants to manually visit each web site, analyze the information there, and make sound business decisions regarding the trading of goods or services. It is inevitable that buyers may miss finding the best product or services in the vast milieu of information. In this new world, software agent technologies offer a robust paradigm for trading on the Internet and foreshadow a dramatically changed approach to conduct analysis, market research, and similar e-business functions. At one level, software agents can be designed to be capable of automating the more routine, tedious, and time-consuming tasks involved in current trading processes. At a higher level, agents can be designed to negotiate and make autonomous decisions and commitments on behalf of their owners (Sandholm, 2001).
Our model focuses on agents acting in environments where large amounts of pre-existing knowledge are required. Knowledge engineering in this setting is concerned with extracting that knowledge and formalizing it using an appropriate logic language, in this case situation calculus. This facilitates a reasoning mechanism for that language than can then be employed to allow us to make inferences from the knowledge base.
Recent developments of platforms such as Sun's Jini facilitate implementation of single or multi-agent systems by enabling discovery and transaction support. We are currently extending this application to a Jini platform, as illustrated in Fig. 2. If a business is to operate in the distributed marketplace environment, the first issue is how agents can discover these marketplaces and search their information base. Jini-like platforms hold potential since they focus on mechanisms allow dynamic discovery of entities on the network and the possibility to manipulate those entities once they have been discovered.
