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One of the major concerns in mobile applications is the processing power and memory. In the meantime when an application uses a lot of processing and memory it tends to reduce the battery life of the device. This is a primary concern for developing advanced algorithmic functions to be able to run in handheld mobile devices. In order to cater to the requirements of the people, the mobile applications are needed in such a way where it consume only a minimum amount of resources in the device, but capable of using the high tech hardware power runs on the server side environment which is also known as the Thin-Client Model for application development. This approach is heavily usable
if the amount of processing becomes higher. In the meantime, mobile enabled retail shopping is also an area which requires such an approach, where the number of retail shops which contribute to achieve a final solution is large. The main problem in the area of retail shopping is the lack of ability of finding the correct product from the correct merchant against various parameters like price of the product, availability during odd hours specially when the user is not in a familiar place and the distance to the location. In an ideal solution, the application should receive pricing/other relevant information from large number of retail shops and process them to create the shopping list to the end
user which also requires large amount of memory and processing power. Mobile Shopper or “mShopper” is an application which provides a solution to the problems in the area of retail shopping by adhering to the above mentioned concept. It runs the user interfaces in the mobile device consuming low processing power, but delegates the tedious processing elements including retrieving bulk data, multi agent processing and result formatting to a remote server. The application provides an easy mechanism to do the day to day shopping which uses mobile technology to manage the shopping activities in a distributed, and service oriented environment with the support of multi agent technology. The agent processors work in the server side, process the available option, comes to a conclusion and then the final result will be sent back to the mobile device. Because of the this approach, it's easy to implement the application for heterogeneous mobile platforms available today which is also changing dramatically in the market. The main focus of the application is to provide easy mobile interaction to the customers in their day to day shopping experience. This application takes the burden of decision making in retail shopping away from the end user. Also the mShopper helps the end users to keep a track of items bought. The system manages the complexity of the
internal overhead including identifying retail shop locations by finding the distance to the place from where the user is, filtering shopping lists, product searching, etc. and provides a convenient User Interface to use simple Input / Output in order to feel a wonderful shopping experience. The application uses dynamic modeling of web services to receive the product information on the run time, location based services to identify the shop location, multi agent technology to identify, create and manage the shopping list and distribute the task among the group. Altogether the “m-Shopper” identifies these trends as the technology for the coming years and provides solutions to reduce the complexity in day to day life. Even though the application is used for mobile retail shopping it can be
used as a sample application to model many other mobile related, decision making systems |
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