MODELING A BLACKBOARD ARCHITECTURE FOR ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

In this paper, we describe a high-level blackboard architecture for electronic commerce. The architecture relies on the presence of supply, demand, and broker agents. The blackboard includes a user agent to interface with the user to determine criteria and needs for particular services. In addition, we describe an evaluation agent that uses a knowledge based system to determine the acceptance, rejection, or negotiation status of services returned to the blackboard by demand agents. We illustrate the possible computation needed within the blackboard using a hotel service request example. 1. Introduction With the growth of the Internet in the past several years, many companies are looking to use this form of communication as another medium for providing their services. This new way of doing business is called electronic commerce (Oliver 1996, Hamalainen, Whinston, & Vishik 1996). Electronic commerce involves two or more participants negotiating for a service or an item over the Interne...