Object-oriented design processes of electronic commerce in a multi-agent environment

Abstract

Corporations are moving from traditional management into a world of agile and electronic business. Such businesses have continually sought to develop information technology (IT) systems, in order to assist in the decision-making of the business process. Due to rapid changes in the business environment this process is subject to ongoing examination. To ensure the agility of electronic commerce, business design process problems must be addressed by a team of specialists or intelligent agents, and be based on object-oriented design, characterized by computability, reusability, and exchangeability. This paper proposes a multi-agent system encompassing an object-oriented approach, to design processes for electronic commerce. This approach entails solutions to design processes, for decision-makers who are geographically separated and operate on differing computer platforms. By combining various objects, different types of design processes can be solved with the same agent-based framework, making this approach very responsive. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-world construct that involves combining objects to complete an electronic commerce model: in particular the logistics objective.