E-Commerce Agents: Marketplace Solutions, Security Issues, and Supply and Demand

353 Pages·2001·3.24 MB·English

by  Jiming Liu

Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2033
SubseriesofLectureNotesinComputerScience
EditedbyJ.G.CarbonellandJ.Siekmann
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
EditedbyG.Goos,J.HartmanisandJ.vanLeeuwen
3
Berlin
Heidelberg
NewYork
Barcelona
HongKong
London
Milan
Paris
Singapore
Tokyo
Jiming Liu YimingYe (Eds.)
E-Commerce
Agents
Marketplace Solutions, Security Issues,
and Supply and Demand
1 3
SeriesEditors
JaimeG.Carbonell,CarnegieMellonUniversity,Pittsburgh,PA,USA
Jo¨rgSiekmann,UniversityofSaarland,Saarbru¨cken,Germany
VolumeEditors
JimingLiu
HongKongBaptistUniversity
DepartmentofComputerScience
KowloonTong,HongKong,China
E-mail:[email protected]
YimingYe
IBMT.J.WatsonResearchCenter
30SawMillRiverRoad(Route9A)
Hawthorne,NY10532,USA
E-mail:[email protected]
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E-commerceagents:marketplacesolutions,securityissues,andsupply
anddemand/JimingLiu;YimingYe(ed.).-Berlin;Heidelberg;New
York;Barcelona;HongKong;London;Milan;Paris;Singapore;
Tokyo:Springer,2001
(Lecturenotesincomputerscience;Vol.2033:Lecturenotesin
artificialintelligence)
ISBN3-540-41934-9
CRSubjectClassification(1998):I.2.11,K.4.4,C.2,K.6.5,H.3.5-7,D.4.6
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Table of Contents
Introduction to E-Commerce Agents: Marketplace
Solutions, Security Issues, and Supply and Demand ............................................. 1
Jiming Liu, Yiming Ye
Part I Marketplace Solutions
A Generalized Platform for the Specification, Valuation, and Brokering
of Heterogeneous Resources in Electronic Markets............................................... 7
Gaurav Tewari, Pattie Maes
Economics of Dynamic Pricing in a Reputation Brokered Agent Mediated
Marketplace............................................................................................................ 25
Giorgos Zacharia, Theodoros Evgeniou, Alexandros Moukas,
Petros Boufounos, Pattie Maes
An Electronic Marketplace Architecture Based on Technology of
Intelligent Agents and Knowledge.......................................................................... 39
Georgia Pinto Barbosa, Fabio Q. B. Silva
Modelling Broker Agents in Electronic Commerce of Multimedia
Products and Services............................................................................................. 61
Isabel Gallego, Jaime Delgado
A Brokering Protocol for Electronic Trading ........................................................ 82
Kwang Mong Sim, Raymond Chan
Price Formation in Double Auctions......................................................................106
Steven Gjerstad, John Dickhaut
Negotiating Agents in Manufacturing Decision Making Processes .......................135
P. W. Lei, M. I. Heywood, C. R. Chatwin
Evaluating Resource Bundle Derivatives for Multi-agent Negotiation of
Resource Allocation ..............................................................................................154
Lars Rasmusson
Part II Security Issues
Conversational Speech Biometrics.........................................................................166
Stéphane H. Maes, -L t(cid:3)Navrátil, Upendra V. Chaudhari
VI Table of Contents
Secure Communication for Secure Agent-Based Electronic Commerce
Applications............................................................................................................180
Joris Claessens, Bart Preneel, Joos Vandewalle
MA/LMA Architecture for Dealing with Malicious Agents in
Agent-Mediated Electronic Markets.......................................................................191
Ding Peng, Shi Jun, Sheng Huan Ye, Liming Lu
Secure Mobile Agent Digital Signatures with Proxy Certificates...........................206
Artur Romão, Miguel Mira da Silva
Agent-Mediated Secure Electronic Transaction for Online Interdependent
Purchases................................................................................................................221
Xun Yi, Chee Kheong Siew, Yuan Miao
An Agent-Based Micropayment System for E-Commerce.....................................247
T. O. Lee, Y. L. Yip, C. M. Tsang, K. W. Ng
Security Issues in M-Commerce: A Usage-Based Taxonomy................................264
Suresh Chari, Parviz Kermani, Sean Smith, Leandros Tassiulas
Part III Supply and Demand
Towards Distributed Workflow Enactment with Itineraries and Mobile
Agent Management.................................................................................................283
Seng Wai Loke, Arkady Zaslavsky
Enterprise Federation and Its Multi-agent Modelization........................................295
Huaglory Tianfield
User-Centered Agents for Structured Information Location ..................................323
Xindong Wu, Daniel Ngu, Sameer S. Pradhan
Using a Speech Technology Agent as an Interface for E-Commerce.....................332
Marie Devlin, Terri Scott
Author Index ........................................................................................................347
Introduction to E-Commerce Agents:
Marketplace Solutions, Security Issues, and
Supply and Demand
Jiming Liu and Yiming Ye
Introduction
The Internet has swept over the computing world like a hurricane. The scope and rate
of change of WWW are stunning and are influencing almost every aspect of human
society. Among the many changes brought by the Internet is the emergence of elec-
tronic commerce over the Web. Electronic commerce activities, such as on-line ex-
change of information, services, and products etc., are bringing business to a whole
new level of productivity and profitability. In parallel with the emergence of electronic
commerce, there have been interesting developments in the area of intelligent software
agents, or software entities that are capable of independent action in open, unpredict-
able environments. The Internet will never reach its full potential as an electronic
marketplace unless e-commerce agents, or proactive Web Programs, are used to
(semi) autonomously perform tasks such as:
(cid:140) mediating among various heterogeneous Web sites,
(cid:140) monitoring contents and notify customers,
(cid:140) performing precision information filtering and comparison,
(cid:140) providing tailored services according to the specialized needs of customers,
(cid:140) assisting customers in making decisions, and
(cid:140) acting on behalf of customers in matchmaking, server monitoring, negotiation,
bidding, auction, transaction, transfer of goods, and follow-up support.
As e-commerce agent technology becomes more mature and standardized, we may
envision that the richness and depth of electronic commerce services will increase and
at the same time new forms of products and services as well as new business opportu-
nities will emerge.
This book is aimed at providing an explicit account for the current state of the art
in intelligent software agent-mediated electronic commerce. The contributed chapters
are organized according to the key issues addressed in the following areas: market-
place solutions, security, and supply and demand.
J. Liu and Y. Ye (Eds.): E-Commerce Agents, LNAI 2033, pp. 1-6, 2001.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001
2 J. Liu and Y. Ye
Marketplace Solutions
Many existing Web sites are at present constructed based on a set of static projections
and fixed assumptions. It would be helpful to develop and deploy on-line intermedi-
aries in the electronic marketplace that can provide or pawn auxiliary services, evalu-
ate the quality of products, and provide recommendations on related or similar prod-
ucts. Chapters 1-8 concern agent-based solutions for electronic marketplaces, covering
such topics as brokering and negotiation support.
Tewari and Maes present an agent-based intermediary architecture, called MARI
(Multi-Attribute Resource Intermediary), for the specification, valuation, and broker-
ing of heterogeneous resources in electronic marketplaces. It enables both buyers and
sellers of non-tangible goods and services to provide relative preferences for the trans-
action partners and for the attributes of products in question. MARI provides the algo-
rithmic supports for gathering user utility functions, valuating potential transaction
partners, and optimally matching buyers and sellers. This multi-attribute utility-based
approach to brokering is appealing as it supports multiple sellers and buyers within
multiple product domains.
Zacharia, Evgeniou, Moukas, Boufounos, and Maes’s work presents an interesting
approach to the problem of setting prices in a knowledge marketplace, i.e., a market-
place where services are transacted. A framework is presented which incorporates a
reputation brokering mechanism and dynamic pricing algorithms. The authors studied
the microeconomic effects in a reputation-brokered, agent-mediated knowledge mar-
ketplace. This marketplace is enriched by dynamic pricing algorithms for agents that
adjust their prices based on the success of the previous bid and/or their owners’ dy-
namically updated reputations.
Barbosa and Silva propose a new electronic marketplace architecture based on in-
telligent agents, contemplating the search and aggregation roles of an intermediary and
provide an example of the proposed marketplace, i.e., medicine purchase and sale.
Their architecture has some interesting features compared to the existing ones; for
instance, it allows various parameters such as the delivery time of the product to be
used in the process of product comparison and uses ontologies to share the knowledge
among the entities that exist in the marketplace.
When the number of buyers and sellers increases, according to Gallego and Del-
gado, the activities in an electronic marketplace will involve various types of business
processes and may require more than one intermediary. While focusing on multimedia
products and services, the authors provide a comprehensive classification of broker
agents according to their characteristics and levels of complexity (namely, products,
customized products, services, and multi-broker).
Sim and Chan describe an information brokering protocol for establishing a con-
nection between buyers and sellers by matching advertisements and requests based on
Introduction to E-Commerce Agents 3
predefined multiple criteria. Experiments have been conducted to test the proposed
protocol. Results show that given a reasonable amount of time, connections estab-
lished based on their approach yield a good user satisfaction rating.
Gjerstad and Dickhaut provide a model of belief-based expected surplus maximi-
zation strategies for buyers and sellers in a double auction scenario. In the model,
beliefs of traders are formed based on observed market data, and actions of traders are
selected to maximize their expected surplus. Buyers and sellers are assumed to have
preferences over monetary rewards that are monotonically increasing. The authors
show that the trading activities resulting from such strategies can quickly and reliably
reach competitive equilibrium prices and complete market efficiency.
Lei, Heywood, and Chatwin propose a decentralized/distributed agent architecture
to support real-time manufacturing decision-making for on-the-spot orders in a gar-
ment industry application. In order to perform robust scheduling task under uncertain
demand patterns, the proposed approach consists of a framework for global control
and management, local ordering heuristics, and a user interface incorporating a Qual-
ity Function Definition (QFD) decision table for capturing user preferences. To reflect
the complex nature of the task, resources and orders are viewed as producers and cus-
tomers in a supply chain, and agents use a market-based model of double auction
during the negotiation process.
Rasmusson’s work addresses the specification of suitable options to capture the
structure of the payoff functions of agents to be designed for a given application. He
provides a model of agents as self-interested actors in a market and presents a frame-
work for reasoning about their actions. The agents can be equipped with a set of re-
sources for trading with other agents based on the requests of a user. The proposed
resource network-based model can not only be used in traditional agent programming
such as travel agents, but also be used in situations such as when agents negotiate
market-based bandwidth reservations over a computer network.
Security Issues
The emerging growth of electronic commerce over the Internet is bringing exciting
opportunities for companies. However, the risk is also imminent. As more and more
Web citizens such as customers, merchants, system integrators, insiders, and espe-
cially hackers are spending more and more time on the “wild” Web, the exposure of a
company to the Internet is the physical equivalent of placing its front door on every
browser in the world. To fully enjoy the benefits of electronic commerce, security
issues such as how to reliably identify an authorized user, how to detect a malicious
agent, how to establish a secure communication, and how to conduct a secure transac-
4 J. Liu and Y. Ye
tion over the Internet must be considered. Chapters 9-15 address the issues of security
in e-commerce agent access, communication, and transaction.
Maes, Navratil, and Chaudhari propose a high security voice-based authentication
method for electronic commerce applications. Their method is capable of performing
the task of determining the identity of a speaker over a very large population and the
task of verifying the identity claim of a speaker based on his or her voice. The former
task combines dialogs to reduce the set of ambiguous speakers and text-independent
speaker identification to accurately recognize the actual user, whereas the latter task
utilizes dialogs with knowledge-based and acoustic-based personal random or prede-
fined questions. They have successfully demonstrated their conversational speech
biometrics method in a telephony prototype.
Claessens, Preneel, and Vandewalle’s chapter addresses the communication secu-
rity for e-commerce agents. It presents a lightweight agent framework that provides
agent communication and agent autonomy facilities to application developers. The
framework is implemented in Java, and the communication security is enabled by
using a Java SSL/TLS library. The SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport
Layer Security) protocols provide entity authentication, data authentication, and data
confidentiality at the socket level.
Ding et. al discuss the issues of system security and application security related to
software agents. In an electronic marketplace, malicious agents can do harm in many
ways, from attacking authorized agents to creating market chaos. In order to prevent
such agents from reproducing and propagating, they suggest a protocol for trusted
third party-based user identity verification and a protocol for agent migration from one
market to another. They also provide reviews of related works.
In order to allow a user to purchase and pay for goods and services on the Internet,
Romao and Mira da Silva previously proposed a payment system protocol, called
SET/A. In their present chapter, they discuss one of the problems of SET/A, namely,
the exposure of private keys when an agent has to digitally sign documents that prove
the occurrence of its operations (something that can be done only by verifying the
user’s private key). Correspondingly, they propose a solution to this problem based on
a proxy certificate mechanism in which the owner of an agent can delegate some
power to the agent. The work of Yi, Siew, and Miao focuses on applying software
agent technology together with cryptographic technology to automate and to secure
electronic transaction for a series of on-line interdependent purchases. The proposed
agent-mediated secure electronic transaction (SET) protocol incorporates a trusted
agent service center into the payment system, and hence the secure payment agent is
able to order and pay for a series of interdependent goods and services according to
the purchase condition of a customer after it is launched from the customer device.
Lee, Yip, Tsang, and Ng introduce an agent-based transaction model for processing
micropayment transactions in a distributed environment and demonstrate this model in