An autonomous agent based engineering sales support system.

Abstract

The Internet has emerged as one of the most popular vehicle for disseminating and sharing information through computer networks. A distributed agent-based solution for e-businesses is presented and evaluated in this paper. The system has been developed to help the salesmen, of a construction firm, in their jobs. This business system has a high degree of autonomy, which has been achieved by the use of deliberative agents. A special type of agents has been developed for this particular system. Such agents use a case-base reasoning system to generate their action plans. These agents can be easily constructed from numerical specifications and have the ability of reasoning and adapting to the environmental changes without human supervision. The paper describes in detail both the multiagent based system and the deliberative agents used in it.