Middleware Services to support Electronic Commerce
by Dimitris Papadakis, Manolis Marazakis and Christos Nikolaou
The Parallel and Distributed Systems (PLEIADES) group of ICS-FORTH
is pursuing research in the area of large scale distributed applications
over the web. Electronic commerce is of particular interest, as a distributed
process that entails activities such as searching and advertising, negotiating,
contracting and ordering, billing and payment, distribution and receipt,
and customer services. Not all these activi-ties are performed in every
commerce transaction, nor are they necessarily performed in this order.
Indeed, they may be performed in parallel.
Electronic commerce will benefit from an infrastructure that encapsulates
these activities into autonomous agents and provides services for co-ordination
and collaboration. Such an infrastructure may benefit other distributed
applications, such as digital libraries, collaboration support environments,
distributed performance monitors, as well.
The environment we are developing provides services to support electronic
commerce activities and consists of the following components:
- Agent Environment
- Workflow Management
- Repository Service
- Monitoring Service.
Agents are software components with essential qualities; they are autonomous,
persistent and mobile and they can reason, act and communicate. In our
environment we use software agents to encapsulate electronic commerce activities.
Customers agents can learn an individual customer's preferences, maintain
profiles, seek out appropriate merchants, and when necessary request further
information from merchants. Agents can also negotiate prices, payment and
delivery options, and either alert customers about potential bargains or
initiate purchases. On the other hand, merchants' agents provide product,
price, billing, and payment information to customers' agents. They may
simply reply to requests for information or may actively seek out customers'
agents. Finally, agents can deliver purchased products to customers, collect
payment, and enforce intellectual properties rights.
Figure: Collecting product information with agents.
Interoperability is a key aspect in electronic commerce, since the Web
is an open system with heterogeneous information sources. Many agent based
environments face this issue with specialised agents for every resource.
In our environment, we maintain a collection of access interfaces in a
distributed repository that may be replicated to enhance availability.
Customers' agents negotiate with merchants to decide the appropriate interfaces
to load from the repository. This service enables a single agent to access
a plethora of diverse resources, extending its default capabilities.
Workflow automation allows the implementation of complex models of interaction.
The desired flow of information and control is described to the workflow
management system with a specification language. At execution time the
workflow manager sequences the commerce activities, passing data and control
appropriately among agents. Removing assumptions about activity sequencing
and data routing from agents improves their robustness to changes. Furthermore,
alternatives to certain activities can be described in the specification
language if agents fail to complete their task.
Maintaining context and state information about electronic commerce
transactions is an important requirement. Monitoring the current state
of interactions is essential to provide customers timely information about
the progress of their transaction. Furthermore, the behavior of the transactions
to be performed can be described using the workflow specification language,
thus enabling our environment to handle customers' requirements when transactions
fail to commit.
We are building a prototype of the environment presented. We have implemented
the parser for the workflow specification language and a centralized repository
service. Mobile agents have been implemented that can migrate to sites
and access resources through a collection of interfaces that are maintained
in our repository. An appropriate network loader has been also implemented
to enable agents to load access interfaces from the network, if these are
not available locally. Our future work includes the implementation of the
workflow scheduler and the distribution of the repository service.
Please contact:
Christos Nikolaou - ICS - FORTH
Tel: +30 80 391676
E-mail: nikolau@ics.forth.gr
