Tireless travel agent
Just say where and when you want to travel, and your virtual representative will find the best deals.
Just say where and when you want to travel, and your virtual representative will find the best deals.
Thanks to the Web, you can now make detailed travel arrangements -- airline, rental car, hotel and dinner reservations -- in the comfort of your home. But it may require hours of searching, and there is no way to be certain you've found the lowest rates. The TabiCan project at IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory (TRL) aims to create mobile agents that autonomously find you the best possible arrangements.
The name "TabiCan" comes from the Japanese "tabi," for travel, and the English "can," as in "can do." TabiCan is envisioned as a virtual community that hosts a set of electronic marketplaces -- say, one each for airlines, hotels, car rental agencies, restaurants and travel agents. Companies within each marketplace would post their own seller agents to advertise products.
TabiCan would assign you a mobile agent. Once you had supplied information such as destinations, dates, price ranges and other requirements, the agent would interact with the various seller agents, and monitor bulletin boards. It would filter out information that didn't meet the requirements, and prioritize what remained according to price or other criteria you might have indicated. Finally, it would email you the best options it had found by a given deadline.
You would then choose
an itinerary -- which would remain active for, say, 48 hours, by which time you would have to commit or pass.
The agents under development are based on aglets, small Java-based agent programs created at TRL that can be dispatched across the Internet. The beauty of agents, says TRL's Yuhichi Nakamura, is that "they can remain at a site and monitor prices, which would constantly be changing, and find the best rates."
The technical burden for TabiCan would be supporting thousands of agents, all interacting with each other to exchange information. Compounding the difficulty, bulletin boards would constantly be updated. The trick, Nakamura says, will be to efficiently schedule the operation of agents so the system doesn't bog down.
Given the challenges, TabiCan is advancing in stages. In August 1998, IBM Japan started a marketplace where Japanese travel agents can post travel packages. They can then get a mobile agent that scans offerings from other travel agents. TRL is now promoting similarly limited marketplaces to the airline and hotel industries. If these do well, it could then begin to link the marketplaces together into a TabiCan virtual community, and make mobile agents available to consumers.
The eventual goal would be to include TabiCan as part of IBM's Net.Commerce family of software products, which help companies conduct electronic commerce. TRL is beginning to develop similar virtual communities for the insurance and banking industries jointly with IBM's
e-business organization in Japan.
Mark Fischetti is a freelance writer who lives in Lenox, Massachusetts.
