Design and Implementation of Auction Agents for Mobile AGent-based Internet Commerce System (MAGICS)

Abstract of thesis entitled “Design and implementation of intelligent auction agents for Mobile AGent-based Internet Commerce System (MAGICS)” submitted by Jie Zhang for the degree of Master of Philosophy at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in January 2004.of thesis entitled “Design and implementation of intelligent auction agents for Mobile AGent-based Internet Commerce System (MAGICS)” submitted by Jie Zhang for the degree of Master of Philosophy at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in January 2004. Auction-based electronic commerce (e-commerce) has become very popular in the past few years. Numerous Web-based auction sites have been set up to support both consumer-oriented and business-oriented transactions. To complement the existing Internet auction services, software agents (or simply agents) are expected to become more commonly used to provide sophisticated and fully automated auction services. To achieve this goal, many agent-based auction systems are being developed worldwide. In this thesis, we investigate the design of auction agents for a mobile agent-based auction system called the Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) Mobile AGent-based Internet Commerce System (MAGICS). Our focus is to design auction agents with different bidding strategies to facilitate e-commerce and mobile commerce (m-commerce). In C2C MAGICS, a bidder can create a mobile auction agent through a proxy server. Equipped with a certain bidding strategy, the mobile auction agent can then move to the required server(s) to carry out the bidding tasks. Based on the commonly used proxy bidding service, we first investigate a deterministic bidding strategy. Essentially, an agent keeps bidding unless the specified maximum bidding price is exceeded. To analyze the bidding strategy, a general mathematical model is set up to evaluate the bidding results. Furthermore,