Special session on

Intelligent e-services and multi-agent systems for Web-based B2C e-commerce

One of the main problems consumers face when shopping is the huge quantity of commercial information to process. Too much information saturates the consumer’s perceptual capacity, so she/he  experiences an information overload.

The firms should provide a balanced consumption environment between consumers’ informational requirements and the flow of commercial information. This is especially sensitive in Internet-based e-commerce environments, because the potential amount of information that a consumer receives during a navigational process may be huge.

The online companies tend every time more to personalize the interactions with customers. But, personalization needs to be effective and valued by customers. Both intelligent e-services and multi-agent systems are especially interesting for the development of studies which try tackle these questions from a hybrid perspective –i.e. artificial intelligence and marketing–, analyzing the effects that these systems have on the individuals’ online consumption processes. Different e-services related to the family of the intelligent e-commerce agents have risen recently to help customers in their online consumption processes; some significant examples are recommender systems, shopping systems, on-line decision support systems, etc. Likewise, it is remarkable the integration of different systems aforementioned in a general architecture based on multi-agent systems, in order to facilitate the diversity of goals related to an online consumption process.

We encourage you to submit a contribution for this session with the following two aspects for decision making uncertainty:

1. Contribution on intelligent e-services to assist the online consumers’ consumption processes. New approaches and applications in different areas of the e-commerce are of special interest. Any research on developing and implementing models or systems that improve the individuals’ online consumption experiences in general, and their online shopping processes, are especially welcome;
2. Contribution for multi-agent based systems (MAS) closely related to different applications to e-service intelligence focused on e-CRM systems or e-commerce architectures.

We specially welcome submissions of papers with the focus on applications, as well as on measuring their effects in modifying the online consumption processes.

Submission Guidelines

Authors are invited to prepare papers of no more than six (6) pages in IEEE style (see the NAFIPS’09 web site for details, http://nafips2009.ewu.edu/) including results, figures, and references.

Important Dates

  Papers due: December 20, 2008

  Notification of acceptance of papers: February 20, 2009

  Final paper submission and Early Registration: March 27, 2009

  NAFIPS2009 Conference: June 14-17, 2009

Please submit your contribution by email to the organisers:

Dr. Luis Martínez-López

martin@ujaen.es

University of Jaén, Jaén. Spain

Dr. Francisco J. Martínez-López

fjmlopez@ugr.es.

University of Granada, Granda, Spain

Internet Research Special Issue

We must remark that the best papers of this session could be extended to be published in the Special Issue on Intelligent e-services and multi-agent systems for Web-based B2C e-commerce in the Journal Internet Research ( http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContainer.do?containerType=Journal&containerId=11229 ). Edited by the organisers of this session.