With the development of information technology, e-commerce has imposed significant impacts on business activities. Meanwhile, the complexity of e-commerce systems, as well as the security concerns, is also increasing. This has brought major challenges to business participants, enterprise managers and government policy makers.

This project will study these complexity and security problems, and develop a social experimental ecommerce platform based on a general complexity research methodology using the artificial systems + computational experiments + parallel execution (ACP) approach.

Executed in parallel with the real-world e-commerce platform, this platform can provide systematic supports to the following three research areas as behavioral rules of participants, micro-economic market structure and business model, business intelligence and knowledge management approaches, and can also provide an experimental environment to assess, validate and revise the research results in these areas. The e-commerce system complexity and security research, as well as the social experimental platform and its key techniques, may help promote the original contributions in e-commerce research of China, and have theoretical and practical significance to the realization of major breakthroughs in e-commerce theory and techniques, and the enhancement of enterprises international competitive power.