Using Stationary and Mobile Agents for Information Retrieval and E-Commerce

The deployment and widespread use of Internet generated a renewed interest in distributed architectures. However, a great number of services offered with these architectures require high-speed network connections. Moreover, there is a widespread proliferation of portable computers and devices (e.g., laptops, palmtops, etc.) which are equipped with low processing capacity. Thus, there is a need for a new

service engineering

that is able to deal with both the demands of high-speed network connections and the capacity limits of the new portable information devices. This new service engineering could very well benefit from multi-agent systems and mobile agents, especially when it comes to the realms of information retrieval and e-commerce. This chapter presents a synthesis of agent technologies and some of its novel applications. Section 1 introduces the basic concepts related to agent technologies. Section 2 presents an agent-based architecture for information retrieval. Section 3 provides the implementation details of this architecture, whose performance is assessed in Section 4. Section 5 suggests a new architecture for product search in e-commerce. Also, Section 6 concludes by highlighting the salient features of agent-based architectures.