Designing a Generic Marketplace Architecture Using Multi-Agent Based Technology

Several architectures were proposed in the literature for modeling the interactions between agents. This paper deals with the integration of the multi-agent system in the electronic commerce architecture. Within the framework of this work, we describe three architectures based on the Multi-Agents design. In these systems, buyer and seller agents interact in an environment, which is similar to an electronic market in order to sell and buy goods. We propose then, an electronic architecture based on intelligent and mobile agents named Virtual Electronic Marketplace based on Mobile Agents (VEMMA). We present the generic model of this architecture as well as an implementation using the Java language and the distributed object philosophy based on Remote Method Invocation (RMI) technology. The originality of our developed architecture is that it allow users to create several kinds of agents within a set of the most required parameters for product description on one hand, and supports a complete set of methods and functions used in communication between agents on the other hand. In addition, the system is scalable and allows any updating task without major modification of the initial system