Agent mediated electronic commerce research at Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol
Chris Preist · ACM SIGecom Exchanges · 2001
Agent technology is a key enabling component in bringing about Hewlett-Packard e-services vision, and for that reason, HP Labs is making significant investments in research in this area. Work on agent technology at HP labs includes agent-mediated B2B e-commerce, distributed agent-based personalization, agent-based trading of Internet bandwidth, automated auction design, mobile agents, user profiling and FIPA standardization activities, among other things. In this article, we describe our work on Agent-mediated B2B e-commerce. We do that based on the lifecycle of a B2B interaction in which the contract plays a fundamental role. The lifecycle comprises the stages of matchmaking, negotiation, contract formation and contract fulfillment. We highlight our research in each of these areas and in service composition.