The past several years have also seen the development of agents and multiagent systems and their expansion from the research community into broad practice.
Agents are a paradigm for constructing distributed, open, dynamic software systems.
The agent paradigm is especially suitable to information-rich environments, not only in the Internet at large, but also in intranets and virtual private networks. Electronic commerce in the broad sense has quickly become the key application of agents and multiagent systems. Technically, it relates to and exploits previous successes in telecommunications management, virtual enterprises, logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing automation, to name but a few areas. Specifically, agents apply in electronic commerce through information access and management, service location, product identification and configuration, personalization, negotiation, and marketplace construction and management. The successful application of agents in electronic commerce requires an understanding of architectures, theories, and techniques that synthesize concepts from distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and database management.