Engineering Agent-Based E-Commerce Systems Using The Semiotic Approach And The DEMO Transaction Concept

As software agents get more sophisticated, it becomes difficult to understand and model such systems. In this paper, we contend that all developers bring to the task of development some implicit or explicit assumptions of the agent communication pattern. This issue is not readily addressed in current literature and represents a gap in knowledge. For this purpose a generic pattern of inter-agent communication is introduced and discussed in this paper. For better understanding and modelling of agent-based e-commerce systems, the semiotic approach and the DEMO transaction concept are briefly introduced. It is shown that the semiotic approach offers a unifying framework for identifying the roles of agents, the responsible human agents and the right/constraints associated with each role. The DEMO transaction concept is applied to model the communicative interaction between agents.