Experimenting with a Multi-agent E-Commerce Environment

Agent technology is often claimed to be the most natural approach for automating e-commerce business processes. Despite these claims, up till now, the most successful e-commerce systems are still based on humans to make the most important decisions in various stages of an e-commerce transaction. Consequently, it is difficult to find successful actually implemented and working largescale agent-based e-commerce applications to confirm agents superiority. Here, we discuss an abstract e-commerce environment that allows agents of different types to interact with each other and operate with an overarching goal of supporting an e-commerce transaction. A prototype system that implements this vision using JADE agent platform is also described. Finally, we report on experiments with the implemented system skeleton.