AGENTS AND ELECTRONIC COMMERCE, HYPE AND REALITY

摘要

Although many people see electronic commerce as a technology driven development, we have shown in this paper that it is an (important) part of some more fundamental developments in doing business. It is important to have some understanding of these developments to understand the main importance of electronic commerce for business. It should never be forgotten that technology has a supporting role for business. Therefore any technological development (such as the use of software agents and electronic institutions) should be judged from the perspective of how it can advance business in the end. Agents can be used in many ways in the electronic commerce process. In order to use them as mediators it is a/most a/ways necessary to create a context in which the trading of the agents takes place. Only when the procedures of the trading are well defined it is feasible to delegate the actual trading to an agent. This context can be provided in the form of an institution. So, institutions can function in two ways. They can be instruments for intermediaries and used to support the function of the intermediary party in the trading process (indirect trading). Institutions can also be used to create a trusted and well-defined environment for direct trading parties. At the moment agents are mainly used in the indirect trading processes, because in those processes there are well defined protocols and institutions that are dictated by the intermediaries of the trading process (the most famous one being the auction houses). In order to use agents in more complex trading processes, the institutions should be extended to allow more types and more flexible protocols. Only when these can be formally defined and the boundaries of the behavior of agents within the institutions is clearly defined can agents successfully be employed in these more complex trading processes. The institutions should be flexible enough to provide different types of scenarios. Depending on the type of product and market situation a certain type of trading can be chosen. This means that agents should be able to select the proper (most efficient or profitable) trading procedure for the case in hand. If the chosen procedure allows some freedom within the interaction (e.g. negotiating in different ways) the agent should agree with the other party on a common acceptable way of interacting. One cannot expect all agents to have the same capabilities, therefore agents should be designed in such a way that they can deal with both simple and complex agents in the context of the same institution. A new challenge will be to design trading agents that function as intermediaries for the trading procedure. They have specialized knowledge on strategies and trading protocols, such that the agents of the trading parties only have to have product and market knowledge and can leave the burden of finding the suitable trading procedure to the trading agent. Some other more general challenges that have to be faced in order to deploy software agents in electronic commerce have to do with the development of agent technology as a whole. Although agents are being build for industry already, there is no general accepted methodology for designing and implementing multi-agent systems yet. Until some industry standard is set many companies will not venture to use agents for their software systems due to the risks in maintaining such systems. The last challenge we want to mention is the lack of a comprehensive agent theory. Although there are formal theories forseveral parts of agents there is no (generally accepted) theory that can describe all aspects of agents in a multi-agent system. (Even the widely quoted BDJ theory is far from complete and leaves many choices for the implementation).