An agent-based process environment for electronic commerce

Electronic commerce process traditionally is enacted by centralized work flow management system which is inflexible and unreliable. Contrarily, the paper presents a decentralized architecture composed of collaborating agents to solve the problem. Also, mobile agent is used to reduce communication burden on the web. Moreover, both process modeling language and agent communication message are modeled by extensible markup language (XML) which is regarded as the universal format on the web. This greatly improves interoperability which is very important, as electronic commerce process normally involves multiple systems with different process modeling languages. This process environment is currently implemented in JAVA, and is based on the IBM aglets software development kit (ASDK).