Software agents for electronic business:: Opportunities and challenges

Electronic business (eBusiness) is one of the main global drivers of information technology. In this paper, we investigate how eBusiness can benefit from methods, components and solutions based on software agent technology. We give an overview of the current electronic business mainstreams and outline a number of important the challenges eBusiness has to tackle. We then describe how agent technology can be applied to in eBusiness to resolve some of these challenges. We discuss related work and the need for integration of any agent technologies into existing eBusiness landscapes and infrastructures. We describe. the opportunities for agent technology in this area. In addition risks and areas of future work are discussed.