Using Situation Calculus for E-Business Agents

Abstract

As the Internet grows, it is becoming less feasible for customers and merchants to manually visit each Web site, analyze the information there, and make sound business decisions regarding the trading of goods or services. To cope with this evolution, software agents can be designed that are capable of automating the more routine, tedious and time-consuming tasks involved in current trading processes. At a higher level agents may also be able to negotiate and make autonomous decisions and commitments on behalf of their owners. This paper describes an agent implementation using the situation calculus, which offers a possibly unifying paradigm for dynamic agents. Interesting applications are currently being developed. Our contribution is a situation calculus agent system developed for e-business. Ongoing work will implement this system in an open marketplace environment.

Keywords: automated agents, e-commerce, e-business