E-Commerce Based Agents over P2P Network

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. 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. 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.