Active Advertissment in Supermarkets Using Personal Agents

Abstract

In this paper we present our approach to active marketing in supermarkets, with an extensive use of radio-frequency identifiers (RFIDs) of goods and locations, and personal, mobile communication devices of clients. Our solution is based on personalized filtering of RFID-related marketing info by the use of software agents. As an implementation base we use the Agent Computing Environment (ACE) framework. ACE agents are partially executed in clients’ mobile devices, and partially in the local area network of a supermarket. These agents are able to filter broadcasted marketing information according to detailed user needs, technical restrictions for end-user device, date and time, previous contacts, etc. Several strategies are proposed to use ACE agents to support everyday shopping in a supermarket, including maintaining shopping lists, personal marketing firewalls, and monitoring for changes.