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Agents in E-Commerce State of the Art Authors: Minghua He and Ho-fung Leung 2002

Agents in E-Commerce State of the Art Authors: Minghua He and Ho-fung Leung 2002. Presenter: Ali Fatolahi CSI 5389 Winter 2006. Presentation Outline. Introduction Roles of Agents in Ecommerce Special Agents for Ecommerce Implementation Tools/Techniques Security Issues Conclusion. Agent.

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Agents in E-Commerce State of the Art Authors: Minghua He and Ho-fung Leung 2002

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  1. Agents in E-CommerceState of the ArtAuthors:Minghua He and Ho-fung Leung2002 Presenter: Ali Fatolahi CSI 5389 Winter 2006 www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  2. Presentation Outline • Introduction • Roles of Agents in Ecommerce • Special Agents for Ecommerce • Implementation Tools/Techniques • Security Issues • Conclusion www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  3. Agent • Ongoing Execution • Environmental Awareness • Agent Awareness • Autonomy • Adaptiveness • Intelligence • Mobility • Anthropomorphism • Reproduction www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  4. Multi Agent System (MAS) • A network of interacting agents in which • Each agent has • partial information • limited capabilities • Knowledge • Information • Resources • a limited viewpoint • There is no global system control • Data are decentralized Who’s in charge?! www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  5. Multi Agent System (MAS) Contd… • Computation is asynchronous • Different agents could be heterogeneous • knowledge representation • data format • reasoning model • solution evaluation criteria • goal • architecture • algorithm • language • hardware platform www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  6. Where to Use? • Telecommunication Systems • Autonomous Vehicles and Spacecraft • Industrial Process Control • Information Retrieval And Filtering • User Interface Design • E-Commerce • Entertainment (e.g. Computer Game And Interactive Cinema) • Medical Care www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  7. CBB (Consumer Buying Behaviour) Model • Need Identification • Product Brokering • Merchant Brokering • Negotiation • Purchase And Delivery • Product Service And Evaluation www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  8. Agents in ECommerce • B2C • Product Brokering • Merchant Brokering • Negotiation • B2B • Supply Chain Management • Special Techniques • Mobile Agents • Evolutionary Agents • Data Mining Agents www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  9. Agents in Product Brokering (B2C) • Agent determines what to buy? • Main Techniques: • Feature-Based Filtering (e.g. Jango) • Looks for the keywords • Collaborative Filtering (e.g. Firefly) • Decides based on the similarities between shoppers’ profiles • Constraint-Based Filtering (e.g. PersonaLogic) • Narrows down list of possible products based on user-given constraints in a step-by-step manner. www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  10. Agents in Merchant Brokering (B2C) • Agent finds the appropriate merchant for a given product. • Main technique is price comparison: • e.g. BargainFinder, Kasbah and Jango • Multi-attribute comparison is also a very promising technique: • Other value-added services must not be ignored • delivery time, warranty, model, make, … • Customer must have the option of choosing between price and other features of the product • Tete-a-Tete (T@T) is the best example. www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  11. Agents in Negotiation (B2C) • Determining the price or other terms of the transaction on the Internet. • Self-Interested Agents try: • To maximize their own parties’ interest • Under bounded rationality and incomplete information • Preparing bids or offers without concern for the global good • Negotiation Strategies and Protocols are required www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  12. Negotiation Protocols and Strategies • Negotiation Protocols • Auctions (retail sails) • Contracts (task allocation and reallocation) • Negotiation Strategies • ZERO Intelligence Strategy • Heuristic Strategy • Non-Cooperative Game Theory • Recursive Modeling Method • Bayesian Learning Method • P-Strategy • Possibility-Based Approaches • Auctioneer's Strategies in Combinatorial Auction www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  13. Auctions and Negotiation • Hundreds of different types of auctions • Nowadays they’re not time-consuming any more • Barriers • How to decide the cost values for new and unvalued goods. • How to empower agents to face with tricks • Rings, Lying Auctioneer, Shills and … • Multi-attribute negotiation is still complicated • T@T tries to provide this capability www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  14. Contracts and Negotiation www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  15. Agents in B2B: Supply Chain • A supply chain is • a network of business units or facilities to • procure raw materials • transform them into intermediate goods • transform them into final products • deliver the products to customers through a distribution system • Primary Cost Sets in a Supply Chain • Inventory • Administrative and Information Flows • Production and Transportation www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  16. Agents in B2B: Supply Chain (Contd.) • Supply Chain Management (SCM) • is the management of the activities on a supply chain so that • the products pass through the chain • in the shortest time with the • lowest cost • SCM Focus • engineering efficient manufacturing processes in past • coordination of activities in the supply chain through knowledge management in present www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  17. Agents in B2B: Supply Chain (Contd.) • SCM functions • coordinating the activities of each tier within the supply chain • facilitating the transaction between tiers • matching the supply with the market demand • Main Roles of Agents in SCM • executing the routine selection process • negotiation about product prices • data transportation www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  18. Agents in B2B: Supply Chain (Contd.) • Other Roles of Agents in SCM • monitoring the execution of the committed orders • informing users of some changes • making adjustments in a timely fashion • Hybrid Agent Solutions are used in Practice • market protocol based on task dependency network • negotiation-based model • CSP Model: Constraint Satisfaction Problems • LCT supply chain model: Leadtime-Cost Tradeoff www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  19. Special Agents for ECommerce • Mobile Agents • agents that can migrate through the netwrok • real-time access to remote resources • agent-to-agent negotiations • Example: MAgNET • networked electronic trading • the Java mobile agent technology (aglets) • MAgNET • A buyer agent • A mobile agent for the buyer • Multiple supplier agents www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  20. Special Agents for ECommerce • Evolutionary Agents • Genetic Algorithms • ever-improving series • best negotiation strategy • matching a population • then improve it! • competitive negotiation www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  21. Special Agents for ECommerce • Data Mining is • discovering new pieces of knowledge behind plenty of data • through classification, regression, summarization, clustering, link analysis, and sequence analysis • to solve business problems such as prediction and forecasting • Data-Mining Agents can • monitor the change of commercial data autonomously • discover new findings • predict some possible consequences • pass the result to relevant customers or managers. www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  22. Implementation Tools www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  23. Security Issues • Mobile Agent Security • malicious hosts • uncooperative or untrustworthy mobile agents • unauthorized extraction and modification • Host Security • malicious mobile agents • Regular Protection Techniques • Agent Security is in its Infancy www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  24. Security Issues (Contd.) • Honesty of Buyers and Sellers • Third-Party Enforcement • banks, post offices and credit-cared companies • Unenforced Ecommerce Transactions • split larger exchanges into smaller parts • Social Laws for Agents! • By a committee of agent-makers • The Problem of Trust • Reputation Mechanisms www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  25. Open Problems • Negotiation • Better Protocols • Sophisticated Negotiations • Risk Assessment • Information Discovery • techniques for information retrieval and filtering • growing quantity of information • Ontology • specification of conceptualization • Security www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  26. Summary • A Comprehensive Survey • Agents Roles in • B2C Ecommerce • B2B Ecommerce • Implementation Technologies • Security Issues • Open Problems • Some agent systems such as Kasbah are not introduce very well. • Links are not valid any more! www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  27. My Judgment • No impressive advancement! • Agents technology is still academic more than industrial • Implemented agents rarely use well-known intelligence techniques. They are based on • Autonomy • Mobility • Ideas • Techniques from expert systems (Negotiation) • What about text mining? (Discovery) www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  28. My Main Idea • Major problem is trust • Agent to Agent • Human to Agent • Agent to Human • An abstract trust framework • What about the trust architecture? • Trust Components • Relationships Amongst Components • Specification of a Trustable Component www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

  29. Thank You, Any Question? www.site.uottawa.ca/~afato092

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