Integrating mobile agent and context-aware workflow analysis for M-commerce applications

Mobile commerce (M-commerce) is an attractive research area due to its relative novelty, rapid growth, and great potential in business applications. Unfortunately, there are a number of constraints effecting both performance and usability of mobile devices and network bandwidth. In addition, existing M-commerce applications are lack of fully automated business processes and still require significant manual effort. In this paper we present a general solution of integrating mobile agent and context-aware workflow to implement automated trading task and compose services dynamically in real time to create a highly personalized assistant. Furthermore, the proposed context-aware model derives from a set of ontology of descriptive contextual attribute for knowledge sharing and logical inference. Instead of executing a fully defined process description, the composite workflow can be executed with forward or backward selection of services determined at run time. We have carried out an evaluation experiment. The results show that our proposed solution is feasible and viable.