Integrating Mobile and Intelligent Agents in e-Marketplaces

The business trends to trade more complex goods and services in inter-connected e-marketplaces and use mobile communication channels drive the requirements for the next generation of e-marketplaces including more advanced trading, mobile access and user support capabilities. This paper presents an attempt, called InterMarket, to address the above requirements by proposing an intelligent mobile agent based emarketplace solution integrating mobile agents and intelligent decision-making agents. InterMarket aims at enabling mobile access and automated trading in emarketplaces with an add-on component to an existing commercial e-marketplace platform. The paper overviews a general concept and solution of InterMarket, and discusses the proposed approach in the context of related research in mobile e-commerce agents and agentmediated e-commerce.