Based on the e-commerce scenario below (adapted and extended from Ogasawara, N. (2005). System and method for electronic shopping using an interactive shopping agent. Google Patents. US Patent 6,868,392),

Write a Java program, to simulate the agent behavior and transactions as described in this scenario. Note that the interactions follow a variant of the Contract-Net protocol. [Hint: For this simulation, agents do not need to be physically distributed and can therefore invoke each other's methods directly and no network programming is required.]

Consider an e-commerce system in which some autonomous agents are selling products on behalf of retailers and other agents are buying products on behalf of customers. These agents interact via a broker agent, which facilitates the shopping process. The broker agent has access to all customer profiles as well as every retailer's product database. Customers and their agents specify the purchase order with various constraints, e.g., price range, quantity, delivery options, etc., and initiate the purchasing process through the broker agent. The broker agent evaluates the order and invites a selection of retailers for their offers. Retailers may provide an offer for the requested product or decline. The broker agent may analyse the offers and recommend the best offer to a customer but customers make the final decision over which product to purchase.

You do not need to emulate Ogasawara’s physical agent architecture and any aspects related to electronic payments and Internet security are beyond the scope of this exercise.

You are required to submit a brief description of your implementation, .java source files and .class files. Marks will be distributed as follows: implementation of buyer agents [15%], implementation of seller agents [15%], successful transactions [20%].

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