Introduction

With the development in technologies of distributed computing, mobile agent technologies and systems have attracted great interest. Commonly, a mobile agent system comprises platforms and mobile agents. Agents are a type of computer software acting autonomously on behalf of an organization or a person (Object Management Group 1997). Meanwhile, platforms are agent systems that can generate, execute, transfer, and terminate agents. Like an agent, an agent system is associated with an authority identifying the organization or person for which the agent system acts. Moreover, agent systems operate on computers connected by networks and can exchange information with each other via a communication infrastructure. While static agents may reside on hosting platform or an immobile system, mobile agents can transport themselves easily from one platform in a network to another. They can also automatically suspend execution on one platform and migrate to another to restart their computations. The capability of them to travel enables a mobile agent to migrate to a destination agent system that contains an entity in which the agent wishes to interact. Furthermore, the mobile agent may utilize the destination agent platform’s services. The advent of electronic business practices has significantly increased the demand for flexibility in distributed computing environments and interoperability to enable realtime exchange of data across enterprise borders, across applications, and across IT platforms. Compared with traditional computing models (e.g., client/server), mobile agent technology has several significant advantages in electronic commerce applications (Busch et al. 1998; Singh and Dave 2013). First, autonomous mobile agents strive to achieve a given goal without continuous supervision by the owner of the agent. Second, when a host is shut down, all mobile agents running on that machine are warned and given time to dispatch; they then continue their operation on another host in the network. Third, users may dispatch agents to a target host via a temporary network connection. After the agent is dispatched, the temporary network connection can be brought down until a later time. In electronic commerce, an intelligent mobile agent that roams the Internet to purchase services or goods on behalf of its owner usually has many advantages. It can specifically allow businesses to respond rapidly to market opportunities and give the competitive edge that is required in business world of today to them. Figure 1 illustrates an intelligent trade agent that roams the Internet buying services or goods from the hosts of three shops in the network. Furthermore, a number of mobile agent-based technologies are developed and put into practice. In Chung et al. (2011), an agent-based English auction protocol was introduced for mobile commerce that allows the bidders to take part into the online auctions by using mobile agents. A silicon intellectual property service and trading platform was proposed in Trappey et al. (2006). A hybrid multiagent negotiation protocol was provided by Wang et al. supporting agent mobility in virtual enterprises (2014), and an autonomous trading system was proposed by Du et al. in electronic marketplace (2005). An architecture that was based on mobile agents allowing the users to do business anywhere and anytime via their mobile devices was introduced in Aloui et al. (2012). An extended contract-netlike multilateral protocol (ECNPro) for multilateral contract negotiations in supply chain management was presented in Wong and Fang (2010).