A business-to-business e-commerce system using software agents and RFID

This paper presents a business-to-business e-commerce system that has two parts: a procurement system based on mobile agents and a logistics control system based on RFID. The focus of this work is on the control system. In particular, two contributions are made. First, we employ an XML-based method that effectively and flexibly reads/writes RFID tags for the purpose of identifying goods. Second, we employ two Markov decision models and a genetic algorithm to find the most space-and-value-efficient way to load trucks using the information on the RFID tags. Analytical results are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the system.