EasiShop: context sensitive shopping for the mobile user through mobile agent technology

Abstract

The attractions of a stable, integrated, real world mobile automated shopping system are clear. For the shopper, the system acquires, on behalf of the user, a sought product without the user entering the retail outlet. For the retailer, transactions could occur cheaply, quickly and with minimum drain on the resources of the retailer. We describe an agent-based, location-aware, automated ubiquitous commerce (uCommerce) system. Within this paper we introduce a set of interoperating technologies to enable an automated uCommerce system using mobile agent interaction facilitated by the Bluetooth wireless radio transmission medium. We describe an architecture and a prototype - EasiShop - based on these ideas and illustrate the operation of the prototype in an example scenario.