Agent-based algorithms for collaborative price search in electronic commerce: a case study and performance evaluation

Authors:
Ali Chamam;Samuel Pierre;Roch H. Glitho
Affiliations:
Mobile Computing and Networking Research Lab, Department of Computer Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada;Mobile Computing and Networking Research Lab, Department of Computer Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada;Ericsson Research Canada, Montreal, QC, Canada
Venue:
Intelligent Decision Technologies
Year:
2008

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Abstract

This paper presents an architecture based on mobile agents to search for admissible prices of a specific item among many merchant sites over the Internet. To make the search more efficient, mobile agents collaborate by exchanging information. In this paper, we present and compare two collaboration strategies: blackboard and inter-agent communication. The performance of the presented strategies was investigated regarding the response time and the induced network traffic. For that, we carried out analytical and experimental estimation of the lower and the upper bounds of the average search time and average induced network flow of each proposed algorithm. We also addressed system scalability with respect to the number of involved agents. Experimental results show that collaboration among agents improves performance compared to non-collaborative solutions and that increasing the number of agents does not always guarantee better performance.