Agents in ECommerce State of the Art Authors: Minghua He and Hofung Leung 2002

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Agents in E-CommerceState of the
ArtAuthorsMinghua He and Ho-fung Leung2002

• Presenter Ali Fatolahi
• CSI 5389
• Winter 2006

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Presentation Outline

• Introduction
• Roles of Agents in Ecommerce
• Special Agents for Ecommerce
• Implementation Tools/Techniques
• Security Issues
• Conclusion

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Agent

• Ongoing Execution
• Environmental
• Awareness
• Agent Awareness
• Autonomy
• Adaptiveness
• Intelligence
• Mobility
• Anthropomorphism
• Reproduction

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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

Whos in charge?!
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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

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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

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CBB (Consumer Buying Behaviour) Model

• Need Identification
• Product Brokering
• Merchant Brokering
• Negotiation
• Purchase And Delivery
• Product Service And Evaluation

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Agents in ECommerce

• B2C
• Product Brokering
• Merchant Brokering
• Negotiation
• B2B
• Supply Chain Management
• Special Techniques
• Mobile Agents
• Evolutionary Agents
• Data Mining Agents

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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.

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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_at_T) is the best example.

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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

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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

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Auctions and Negotiation

• Hundreds of different types of auctions
• Nowadays theyre 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_at_T tries to provide this capability

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Contracts and Negotiation
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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Special Agents for ECommerce

• Evolutionary Agents
• Genetic Algorithms
• ever-improving series
• best negotiation strategy
• matching a population
• then improve it!
• competitive negotiation

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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.

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Implementation Tools
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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

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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

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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

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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!

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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)

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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

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Thank You, Any Question?