Software agents are flexible, autonomous, and dynamic computational entities. For B2C e-commerce applications, the wide variety of choices to the consumers has also introduced the problem of information overloading. Meanwhile, there are so many e-shops and products for the consumers that it has become too time-consuming to find the best deal. In this paper, we present PumaMart, a Parallel and autonomous agents based Internet Marketplace, which deploys several novel models to facilitate

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... s and automatic online buying and selling by software agents (stationary and mobile) while providing fast response to consumers. These techniques include a 2-phase evaluation model, a parallel dispatch model and an auction-like negotiation model. Both evaluation model and negotiation model are based on the fuzzy evaluation criterion with clustering based grading function. What a consumer needs to do is to submit requests including the information for the desired products, selection preferences, through a web page in a Java-enabled browser. These information will be sent to the master agent at the server of the Agent Service Provider (ASP), which will employ its worker agents for subsequent shop searching/filtering, offer gathering/evaluating, negotiating, even booking and payment.