Agents and P2P Combined For E-commerce

Electronic commerce technology is more and more present and people are getting connected together. Companies and users want to automate their task and discover new business opportunities. Many standards and initiatives have been already proposed. Most of them focus on business-to- business protocol definition. Rosettanet, cxml, xcbl and bizTalk are only a few examples. Users and companies then have a set of protocols they need to understand and master for implementing solutions. With the increasing number of protocols, companies need a solution permitting them to easily integrate different protocols. Unfortunately, the commercial solutions provided today do not provide sufficient support for integration. Software agents have already been proposed as a key technology for connecting people and adding new features in electronic trading. However, most of the agent-based solutions already proposed have not really changed the user's experience, neither have they brought a major shift from traditional activities in classic markets. This is mainly due to their inflexibility. In fact, these solutions predefine rules and policies in ways that users feel uncomfortable and are limited in their actions. Agent-based systems seem to appear as a key technology that gives users more autonomy and that is yet flexible enough to integrate new business scenarios. In this paper we propose an agent-based solution that could be used to wrap in existing systems and applications. We show how it could be easy to support new protocols without being forced to rewrite solutions from scratch. The work proposed combines both, advantages from software agent technology, and from P2P networking technology. The solution has four layers where each one encapsulates a specific set of functionalities: communication, business, cooperation and coordination. Users can adapt or modify the internal structure of one layer without necessarily affecting the others.