Mobile agents for a brokering service in the electronic marketplace

The electronic marketplace is a new medium for exchanging information, goods, services, and payments. It houses infrastructure, facilitates transactions, and matches buyers with sellers. A mobile-agent-based marketplace allows corporate data to be maintained by local buyers and sellers and transferred to the marketplace only when orders are matched. This provides the participating companies with autonomy and independence. This study proposes a framework for using mobile agents to demonstrate autonomous behavior in the electronic marketplace. A prototype system is developed to demonstrate the implementation of this framework. Furthermore, a simple simulation design is used to explore the performance of mobile agents using two different product-purchasing policies. Statistics regarding execution time are collected and analyzed. The results suggest that mobile agents can easily aggregate orders and shorten the execution time for matching orders. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.