Mobile Agents in E-Commerce

A mobile agent is a composition of computer program, data, and execution state, which is able to move from one computer to another autonomously and continue its execution on the destination computer. Mobile agents provide a new programming paradigm for building agile distributed systems. The ability to travel allows a mobile agent system to move computation to data source systems. This decentralized approach improves network efficiency since the processing is performed locally. For example, in an e-commerce application shown in Figure 1, mobile agents are used to search and purchase products. Once the Buyer Server receives a buyer’s purchase request, it generates a mobile agent and sends it to the Information Server to search retailers who sell the product. Having a list of retailers, the Buyer Server dispatches a mobile agent visiting these retailers. The mobile agent negotiates with retailers’ local seller agents and reports the offers to the Buyer Server. The Buyer Server evaluates all the offers, and sends a purchase mobile agent to the best offer retailer to make the final purchase