MAgNET: mobile agents for networked electronic trading

Abstract

AbstractÐElectronic commerce technology offers the opportunity to integrate and optimize the global production and distribution supply chain. The computers of the various corporations, located throughout the world, will communicate with each other to determine the availability of components, to place and confirm orders, and to negotiate delivery timescales. In this paper, we describe MAgNET, a system for networked electronic trading that is based on the Java mobile agent technology, called aglets. Aglets are dispatched by the buyer to the various suppliers, where they negotiate orders and deliveries, returning to the buyer with their best deals for approval. MAgNET handles the deep supply chain, where a supplier may need to contact further suppliers of subcomponents in order to respond to an enquiry. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using the Java aglet technology for electronic commerce. Fig. 2. A mobile aglet runs on server A and is dispatched to server B. Before the aglet leaves server A, its onDispatching method is invoked. Similarly, the aglet's onArrival method is invoked before the aglet starts to run on server B. P. Michael Melliar-Smith received a PhD degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge, England. He is now a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include faulttolerant distributed systems and high-speed communication networks and protocols. He is a member of the ACM, the IEEE, and the IEEE Computer Society.

Flexible Infrastructure for Virtual Enterprises

“…The deployment of mobile software agents has been studied in applications such as networked electronic trading [4] and mediation of negotiations [13]. In the latter, software agents play the role of a human supervisor, who is in charge of the tracking, monitoring and problem management of a specific product item.…”

Performance Evaluation of Mobile Agents for E-commerce Applications

“…MAgNET [3], Gossip [www.tryllian.com]), they have still not translated into a significant number of real-world applications. We believe that one of the main reasons for this is the lack of work that quantitatively evaluates (i) the effectiveness of one mobile agent framework over another, and (ii) the effectiveness of mobile agents versus traditional approaches.…”

Fuzzy Multiple Agent Decision Support Systems for Supply Chain Management

“…discuss a model for agent negotiation and conversation in an agent based supply chain management. Dasgupta et al (1999) focus on the negotiation between suppliers in different stages in supply chain management. Chauhan (1997) and Lau et al (2000) propose a methodology for multi-agent systems development in supply chain.…”