PISAGOR: a proactive software agent for monitoring interactions

Abstract

E-commerce has become an integral part of everyday life. Many e-commerce systems enable users to browse products, place orders, and track deliveries online. However, these interactions is time-consuming, especially if they do not proceed as expected. Instead of a human user, software can offer automated support to monitor e-commerce transactions to ensure that they are completed by the businesses as planned. Accordingly, this paper studies methods to develop a software agent for monitoring its users' interactions with businesses (PISAGOR). The interactions are represented as commitments, which have been extensively studied in multiagent systems. With a commitment-based specification at hand, the agent knows what the meaning of its interactions are and can therefore reason over its actions. The reasoning is accompanied with the as-good-as relation that compares the agent's current state with its expectations from a transaction. This enables PISAGOR to decide whether the transaction is progressing as expected. Moreover, we propose operational rules for the agent to create expectations based on its commitments and check its progress toward them. We demonstrate via a case study how PISAGOR can detect if a user's interactions are not progressing well and identify a problem for the user to take action.