aKIA Automobile: a Multi-Agent System in E-Commerce

Electronic commerce is a domain where agent technologies are well suited. The search and retrieval of product information is crucial in every E-commerce system. While some systems provide the user just with a fixed selection of products, others offer a wide variety of products with different characteristics. In this case, the system must provide means to efficiently and accurately search and retrieve product information according to the user’s desired product characteristics. In this paper, a three-layer architecture specifically tailored for data retrieval in a distributed network data system is presented. In particular, it includes search methods allowing for measuring the matching rate between the user’s query and the products found. These methods allow to easily re-formulate the user’s queries for better matching his request. The architecture has been implemented and tested in the case of a second-hand automobile market. The practical results obtained are encouraging in that the system works as expected and shows promising performance characteristics.

, 2002