Intelligent Agent based Mobile Shopper

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and services through wireless handheld devices such as cellular telephone and personal digital assistants (PDA). This research focuses on the use of mobile devices for shopping. The normal shopping process involves a human visiting each store and perusing the items available. A purchase decision is then made based on the information gathered. There however a number of unique challenges that a human shopper will face if they are executing this process using a mobile device such as a phone. With this in mind we now propose an intelligent agent based mobile shopper that performs shopping on behalf of customers. This research demonstrates that by employing an intelligent mobile agent in this mobile environment, we can address many of these challenges. For our research we concentrated on shopping for mobile phones, but we believe that the principles can be applied to any product or service. The intelligent mobile agent replicates the job of the human being. Agents gather information about the products through Store Coordinator Agents and compare it with the user preferences. The agent adapts user´s preferences based on the products that are available. The proposed agent based system is composed of two agents: a User Agent and Store Coordinator Agent. The implementation has been done using JADE-LEAP development kit and the performance results are discussed in the paper.