Protecting Competitive Negotiation of Mobile Agents
H. Vogler, A. Spriestersbach, M.-L. Moschgath
Abstract
The paradigm of mobile agents has reached its popularity and attraction from typical application scenarios, which are located in the area of Electronic Commerce.
In these common application scenarios, mobile agents get a task from its owner to buy certain goods.
To fulfill this task, the agent wanders to various merchants and collects information about the different offers.
In this paper we present an architecture that allows mobile agents to evaluate multiple issues of an offer, such as price, guatrantee or shipping fees,
by special value functions. Additionally, the mobile agent can autonomously and automatically negotiate with the vendor about the offer.
The process of negotiation in the area of Electronic Commerce is competitive and thus the agent platform must avoid, that vendors can
spy out which tactic and strategy the mobile agents use. To ensure the relevant information for the negotiation mechanisms and functions
we use a pair of cooperating agents to achieve a secret splitting.