An architecture for an Internet Marketing Multi-Agent System using AUML

Issue title: Special Issue on Agent-oriented Software Development Methodologies

Guest editors: Hong Zhu

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Chin, Kai-Yi^a | Lin, Jim-Min^{a; *} | Hong, Zeng-Wei^a | Lin, Chih-Wei^a | Lin, Arthur^b

Affiliations: [a] Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung City 407, Taiwan | [b] Department of Business Administration, National Taipei University, Taipei City 100, Taiwan | Department of Computing, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX33 1HX, UK

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: An Internet Marketing Multi-Agent System (IMMAS) has been proposed to enhance traditional Internet marketing mechanism through the mobile agent technique [3]. A critical design of the proposed system is the introduction of two software agents, namely a Sales agent and a Personal agent, for performing the delegated jobs of the designated marketing activity helping customers to assist his own job administration respectively. This paper is aimed to report the architecture for IMMAS represented in form of Agent UML (AUML) specifications. The strength of a multi-agent architecture is highly dependent on the coordination of multiple distributed software components. Therefore, the description of IMMAS architecture will be focused on the coordination and interaction patterns among multiple agents in a three-layer presentation. This architecture could be helpful to and used as the reference for later software engineers in agent-based software systems.

Keywords: Software agent, marketing, Personal agent, Sales agent, Internet Marketing Multi-Agent System (IMMAS), Agent-based Unified Modeling Language (AUML)

DOI: 10.3233/MGS-2006-2408

Journal: Multiagent and Grid Systems, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 413-433, 2006