Agent-oriented technology in support of e-business
Mike P. Papazoglou · Communications of the ACM · 2001
This article reports on the growth of the Internet networking systems and its positive effects in increasing businesses participating in e-commerce. One of the key characteristics of the e-business world is that companies will inevitably move more and more into a customer-centric paradigm in order to increase competitiveness. Customer behavior cannot be accurately predicted using traditional analytic methods like forecasting or budgeting. Instead, companies seeking a competitive edge will investigate other kinds of analytical methods based on, for example, heuristics. Intelligent business agents are the next higher level of abstraction in model-based solutions to business-to-business e-commerce applications. By building on the distributed object foundation, agent technology can help bridge the remaining gap between flexible design and usable applications. This technology allows the development of rich and expressive models of an enterprise and lays the foundation for adaptive, reusable business software. Agent-oriented technology can be leveraged to enhance enterprise modeling as well as to offer new techniques for developing intelligent applications and infrastructure services.