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AbstractÐElectronic commerce technology offers the opportunity to integrate and optimize the global production and distribution supply chain. The computers of the various corporations, located throughout the world, will communicate with each other to determine the availability of components, to place and confirm orders, and to negotiate delivery timescales. In this paper, we describe MAgNET, a system for networked electronic trading that is based on the Java mobile agent technology, called aglets. Aglets are dispatched by the buyer to the various suppliers, where they negotiate orders and deliveries, returning to the buyer with their best deals for approval. MAgNET handles the deep supply chain, where a supplier may need to contact further suppliers of subcomponents in order to respond to an enquiry. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using the Java aglet technology for electronic commerce. Fig. 2. A mobile aglet runs on server A and is dispatched to server B. Before the aglet leaves server A, its onDispatching method is invoked. Similarly, the aglet's onArrival method is invoked before the aglet starts to run on server B. P. Michael Melliar-Smith received a PhD degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge, England. He is now a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include faulttolerant distributed systems and high-speed communication networks and protocols. He is a member of the ACM, the IEEE, and the IEEE Computer Society.

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The SecureGroup group communication system multicasts messages to a group of processors over a local-area network, and delivers messages reliably and in total order. It also maintains the membership of the group, detecting and removing faulty processors and admitting new and repaired processors. The SecureGroup system provides resistance against Byzantine faults such as might be caused by a captured or subverted processor or by a Trojan horse. The reliable message delivery protocol employs hardware broadcasts and novel acknowledgment mechanisms that reduce the number of acknowledgments and messages required to ensure reliable delivery. The total ordering protocol continues to order messages despite the presence of Byzantine and crash faults, provided that a resilience requirement is satisfied. The group membership protocol operates above the total ordering protocol and, thus, simplifies its design and protects it against malicious attacks.

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