No abstract

No abstract

In this paper we propose electronic contract negotiation -a sub-part of the more general area of electronic commerce -as an example application for mobile agents. We start by presenting a set of requirements that an application should fulfilL in order to take advuntage of mobile agents and show that not all distributed applications meet these requirements. We then present contract negotiation, an example of an application that can potentially take full advantage of mobile agents. The paper also contains an introduction to a mobile agent system being developed at Hamburg University and show how it can be used to implement contract negotiation.

Based on the specific characteristics and requirements for an adequate electronic commerce system support, this article gives an overview of the respective distributed systems technologies which are available for open and heterogeneous electronic commerce applications. Abstracting from basic communication mechanisms such as (transactionally secure) remote procedure calls and remote database access mechanisms, this includes service trading and brokerage functions as well as security aspects including such as notary and non-repudiation functions. Further important elements of a system infrastructure for electronic commerce applications are: Common middleware infrastructures, componentware techniques, distributed and mobile agent technologies etc. As electronic transactions enter the phase of performance, increasingly new and important functions are required. Among these are: Negotiation protocols to support both the settlement and fulfillment of electronic contracts as well as ad-hoc workflow management support for compound and distributed services in electronic commerce applications. In addition to an overview of the state of the art of the respective technology, the article briefly presents some related projects conducted by the authors jointly with international partners in order to realize some of the important new functions of a system infrastructure for open distributed electronic commerce applications.

No abstract