Building Electronic Market Places With Mobile Agents

Electronic commerce has seen an explosive growth in the recent past with the Business-to- Customer model being the most popular among Internet users. A market place is a place where people meet for the purpose of trade by purchase and sale. The idea behind e-markets is to replace physical business transactions with electronic business transactions using the Internet. Here vendors and suppliers provide a virtual shop for buyers to purchase items online. This has brought about a great increase in the buyer's convenience to shop. However, the buyer still has to go to every vendor site to find the best bargain for an item. The next step in electronic commerce suggests that the consumer be allowed to go to only one site that gives him the best results from multiple vendors in order of his priorities.The goal of this thesis is to design such a system. Our electronic marketplace allows multiple vendors to be registered on it. A user specifies his requirements, which is then satisfied by searching across the entire marketplace arriving at the best possible fit. If exact matches are not found, the next best options are returned to the user by dynamically improving the intelligence of search algorithms. Instead of following the conventional client-server model to implement our electronic market place prototype system, we are experimenting with software agents for transporting data back and forth between the market place and its users. Among the different software agents that are available, our preferred model is the Java-based Aglet model. The use of software agents to implement the market place adds robustness and scalability to the system.