ABSTRACT

Mobile software agents are emerging as a major trend of distributed systems in the near
future. Different mobile agent frameworks are being actively developed in the research
community. Looking forward, electronic commerce and information retrieval are two
prospective directions for application of mobile agents. The mobile agent based Shopping
Information Agent System is to provide a user with current e shopping information & to
help the user to make economical shopping decisions. Furthermore, it offers a generalized
model for writing mobile agent applications not only, but specially designed for
information retrieval purposes.
In this project effort has been made to design and develop a mobile agent based system
that conforms to Service Oriented Architecture(SOA). The concept of an SOA is not
new, Service-oriented architectures have been used for years. Examples of earlier SOA
systems are: Java RMI, CORBA, DCE, DCOM. However what is relatively new is the
emergence of Web Services-based SOAs. Web services are the fundamental building
blocks in the move to distributed computing on the Internet. Open standards and the
focus on communication and collaboration among people and applications have created
an environment where Web services are becoming the platform for application
integration.
Mobile Agent system for Shopping information retrieval that favors the B2C –Business
to Consumer e-commerce. The SIAS is built on Tracy mobile agent system developed by
Computer Science Department of Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
The SIRS here involves a client side part of software, a server side application and a
mobile agent. Client side part of software is capable to feed special query for the price
and desired quantity of the selected product with brief specification to new mobile agent
& launch it. A server side application is responsible for the outward representation of the
product database an e commerce vendors offers. Lastly the mobile agent itself-a program
with the ability to carry user’s query and its results and to call on host specified in its
iternary. The agent visits all hosts and collects result from them .During its round trip it is
able to make decisions according to self developed plan and return back to launch server
which passes the result to the user for making the economical shopping decision.