Research On Mobile Agent-based E-commerce System

With the development of the computer and network technology, the commercial behaviors become more and more universal and e-commerce arises at the historic moment. The distances between companies, companies and users are reduced to zero by taking advantage of Internet, which brings companies infinite business opportunity. But the increase of the information and business volume result in low efficiency of goods searching and a waste of man, resource and time in the negotiation process. So it is urgent to make e-commerce fast, high efficient and intelligent.The Mobile Agent technology is the combination of Agent technology and distributed computing, which support interrupted computing, save network bandwidth, overcome the isomerization of network, has good fault-tolerance, and provide a natural model for e-commerce. The Mobile Agent technology also overcomes the drawbacks in the structure of RPC-based Client/Server and the Internet-based three levels structure of WWW technology, Browser/Server and Database technology, such as single mode, unflexible, etc, and it shows good prospect of technology and application. So the Mobile Agent is considered as the mainstream of distributed computing pattern and attracts widely attention in industrial and scientific community. The autonomy, mobility, collaboration, security and intelligence of Mobile Agent provide a new solution for the development of e-commerce.In this paper, a Mobile Agent-based e-commerce prototype system was established using Java language and supported by a mobile agent platform--Aglet. In the same time, a Mobile Agent-based e-commerce negotiation model was proposed and described in formulation. The key module of this prototype system was realized and tested in function and capability, which show the prototype system has a good extensibility and reliability.