The Fourth International Conference on Electronic Business (ICEB2004) / Beijing 1213 Using Intelligent Agents to Build E-Business Software Adrien Coyette, Manuel Kolp, Stéphane Faulkner Information Systems Research Unit, University of Louvain, 1 Place des Doyens, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium {coyette, kolp, faulkner}@isys.ucl.ac.be ABSTRACT Agent architectures are gaining popularity for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by e-commerce applications. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining patterns and languages for agent architectural design. This paper proposes a modern approach based on organizational structures and architectural description languages to define and specify agent architectures notably in the case of e-commerce system design. Keywords: Agent Systems, Architectural Description Language, Organizational Styles, E-commerce Application 1. INTRODUCTION The meteoric rise of Internet and World-Wide-Web technologies has created overnight new application areas for enterprise software, including e-commerce applications. These areas demand software that is robust, can operate within a wide range of environments, and can evolve over time to cope with changing requirements. Moreover, such software has to be highly customisable to meet the needs of a wide range of users and sufficiently secure to protect personal data and other assets on behalf of its stakeholders. Not surprisingly, researchers are looking for new software designs that cope with such requirements. One promising source of ideas for designing such e-commerce software is the area of agent architectures. They appear to be more flexible, modular and robust than traditional including object-oriented ones. They tend to be open and dynamic in the sense they exist in a changing organizational and operational environment where new components can be added, modified or removed at any time. To cope with the ever-increasing complexity of the design of software architecture, architectural design has received through the last decade increasing attention as an important field of software engineering. Practitioners have come to realize that getting an architecture right is a critical success factor for system life-cycle and have recognized the value of making explicit architectural descriptions and choices in the development of new software. To this end, a number of architectural description languages (ADL) and architectural styles [4] have been proposed for representing and analyzing architectural designs. An architectural description language provides a concrete syntax for specifying architectural abstractions in a descriptive notation while an architectural style constitutes an intellectually manageable abstraction of system structure that describes how system components interact and work together. Unfortunately, despite this considerable work [9], few research efforts have aimed at truly defining styles and description languages for agent architectural design. To fill this gap, we have defined, in the SKwyRL project (http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/skwyrl/), architectural styles for agent systems based on an organizational perspective [2] and have proposed in [3] SKwyRL-ADL, an agent architectural description language. This paper continues and integrates this research: it focuses on an agent perspective for designing and specifying e-commerce software architecture based on organizational styles and SKwyRL-ADL. The structure-in-5 organizational style will be instantiated to design the architecture of the system and the specifications will be expressed in a formal way with SKwyRL-ADL.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces some perspectives of SKwyRL insisting on the BDI model, our ADL and organizational styles. Section 3 describes our agent oriented approach on e-commerce system development, including the design of the global architecture with organizational styles, its formal specification with SKwyRL-ADL and the corresponding implementation on an agent-oriented platform. Finally, Section 4 concludes the research.. 2. ADL AND STYLES IN SKWYRL We have detailed in the SKwyRL project an agent ADL called SKwyRL-ADL [3] that proposes a set of abstractions that are fundamental to the description and specification of agent architectures based on the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) agent model. To help the reader to understand our ADL specification in the rest of the paper, we briefly present the main elements of SKwyRL-ADL including the BDI agent model. SKwyRL-ADL is composed of two sub-models which operate at two different levels of abstraction: internal and global. The internal model captures the states of