A two-leveled mobile agent system for electronic commerce

Electronic commerce technology offers the opportunity to integrate and optimize the global production and distribution on the supply chain. Computers of various corporations, located throughout the world, communicate with each other to determine the availability of components, to place and confirm orders, and to negotiate delivery timescales over the Internet. Software agents help to automate a variety of tasks including those involved in buying and selling products over large-scale networks like the Internet. This paper presents a two-leveled mobile agent system for electronic commerce based on mobile agents, using the publish/subscribe protocol for registration and transaction processing. In a large-scale and dynamic environment, there can be any number of buyers and suppliers at any time. In this system, suppliers can connect, register or unregister to the system at any time, thus preserving the dynamic structure of the system. It not only simulates real commercial activities by buyers, agents and suppliers, but also provides an environment for parallel processing. The latter is particularly important as more shops (sites) can be searched in real time to provide buyers with better choices. Meanwhile, if the number of mobile agents is very large and their dispatching is processed in a serial way, it can become a bottleneck that affects the efficiency as a whole.

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