A DISTRIBUTED BANKING SYSTEM USING MOBILE AGENTS : AN APPROACH FOR E-commerce

Abstract

The anticipated increase in popular use of the Internet will create more opportunity in information dissemination, electronic commerce, and multimedia communication, but it will also create more challenges in organizing information and facilitating its efficient retrieval. From the network perspective, there will be additional challenges and problems in meeting bandwidth requirement and in network management. In response to this, new techniques, languages and paradigms have evolved which facilitate the creation of such applications. Perhaps the most 'promising among the new paradigms is the use of mobile agents. In this dissertation mobile agent technology has been applied in an electronic commerce application. For this a Banking System is developed whose database may be distributed over various systems located in different places on the Internet. A customer can send his mobile agent to perform various task involved in banking and get back an appropriate result. PMADE [1] is used as the platform to develop these mobile agents. A security check has also been implemented, as this is an important requirement for e-commerce, and some constraints are required for opening and maintaining an account in a bank. Situations when a customer may have different accounts in the same or different banks have also been dealt with. The application is developed using JAVA 2v1.2, PMADE, JDBC-ODBC driver, MS Access, TextPad and tested on WINOWS 9x.