Agent-based e-commerce is a promising novelty that performs tasks such as payment, mediation, interaction, and sales promotion in simple and intelligent manners. The agents can be endowed with attributes such as mobility, intelligence, and autonomy. Constructing appropriate architecture for agent systems in e-commerce is a fundamental consideration in facilitating agent-based transactions (Lee, Kang, & Lee, 1997). A practical way is to provide sites with methods to fabricate various agents according to the requirements of the clients. Due to the nature of e-commerce and the Internet, agents should be able to adapt to a changing environment automatically. Agents should therefore be able to evolve in terms of intelligence and also be able to roam so as to utilize the power of network computing (Guan & Yang, 1999; Yang & Guan, 2000). In order to meet the requirements discussed and to provide an environment for an in-depth research in e-commerce, this chapter proposes secure agent fabrication, evolution and roaming (SAFER) for e-commerce. DESCRIPTION OF SAFER Secure Agent Fabrication Evolution and Roaming (SAFER) is an infrastructure to serve agents in e-commerce and establish the necessary mechanisms to manipulate them. The goal of SAFER is to construct open and evolutionary agent systems for e-commerce. The SAFER architecture comprises different communities, as are described in Figure 1. Each community consists of the following components: Owner, Butler, Agent, Agent Factory, Community Administration Center, Agent Charger, Agent Immigration, Clearing House and Bank, which are illustrated in Figure 2. Each component will be elaborated in the following subsections.
Modeling and Programming by Commitment Rules in Agent Factory
