A multi-agent searchbot system for electronic commerce

Dissertant

Murhir, Asma

Thesis advisor

Rashidi, Taj al-Din

Comitee Members

Smith, K.

University

Al Akhawayn University

Faculty

School of Science and Engineering

Department

Computer Science

University Country

Morocco

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2000

English Abstract

This project explores the idea of a multi-agent system (SearchBof) that aims to narrow down the overhead of human effort in the evolving area of electronic commerce, and that can assist users at the earlier stages of the buying process.

The approach that takes SearchBot is twofold: firstly, product brokering which includes retrieval of product information to help determine what to buy, and secondly merchant brokering which combines the results from the previous stage with merchant specific information to help determine who to buy from.

The architecture consists of three main agents: the User Agenf (UA), a personal assistant for the consumer, the Company A^eru (CA) acts as a virtual salesperson for the vendor and the Portal Agent (PA) a broker which matches buyers with sellers.

The underlying interoperability between agents within the system is addressed by KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language) as a high level communication language for message specilkationj and by CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) in terms of design and implementadon to allow agents to communicate with one another regardless of their location, programming language or the platform they are running on.

In this work a design decision was to focus on speeding up the process of locadng items of interest for users* the actual transaction is beyond the scope of the project.

Main Subjects

Engineering & Technology Sciences (Multidisciplinary)

No. of Pages

77

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-646916