Combining Rule-Based and Plug-in Components in Agents for Flexible Dynamic Negotiations Costin B˘ adic˘ a 1 , Maria Ganzha 2 , Marcin Paprzycki 3 , and Amalia Pˆ ırv˘ anescu 1 1 University of Craiova, Software Engineering Department Bvd.Decebal 107, Craiova, 200440, Romania badica costin@software.ucv.ro 2 Gizycko Private Higher Educational Institute, Department of Informatics Gizycko, Poland ganzha@pwsz.net 3 Oklahoma State University, Computer Science Department Tulsa, OK, 74106, USA and Computer Science, SWPS, 03-815 Warsaw, Poland marcin@cs.okstate.edu Abstract. For software agents to become part of e-commerce they have to be flexible—to engage in negotiations of forms which are not known in advance, and mobile—to migrate to remote locations. This note aims at combining flexibil- ity with mobility by joining rule-based mechanism representation with modular mobile agents. Furthermore, we focus on a more complete e-commerce scenario and address questions like: what happens before negotiations start and after they are finished, where from the purchase is actually made etc. Description of agent interactions in such a complete e-commerce scenario is presented. 1 Introduction Recent advances in auction theory have produced a general methodology of describing price negotiations [9]. To engage in negotiations, forms of which are unknown in ad- vance, agents have to be appropriately flexible [3]. Furthermore, it is argued that they have to be mobile to be used in realistic applications [2]. However, mobile agents have to be lightweight to be able to swiftly move across the network. Unfortunately, flexible agents cannot be lightweight as they have to “carry” their intelligence with them [8]. In this note we describe architecture of a multi-agent e-commerce system that aims at combining flexibility and mobility. Our proposal builds on: (i) conceptual architecture of a multi-agent e-commerce system summarized in [3]; (ii) flexible framework that al- lows agents to participate in arbitrary negotiations described in [1], and (iii) lightweight modular agents that migrate to remote markets and engage in negotiations [3] (see also references quoted there). Furthermore, we extend the proposed approach beyond the “act” of negotiation. In [7] negotiations were extended to include matchmaking. In our work we consider: matchmaking, negotiating and purchasing. Interestingly, processes between completion of price negotiations and actual purchase, while involving a num- ber of possibilities, are practically forgotten in literature.