TY - GEN
T1 - Toward an open virtual market place for mobile agents
AU - Esmahi, L.
AU - Dini, P.
AU - Bernard, J. C.
N1 - Funding Information:
In recent years, many researchers in intelligent agents domain have focused on the design of market architectures for electronic commerce (E-commerce) [2][3][4], and on protocols governing the interaction of self-interested agents [5] engaged in such transactions. While providing support for direct agent negotiation, the existing architectures for multiagent virtual markets usually lack explicit facilities for handling negotiation protocols [6], since they don’t provide such protocols as an integrated part of the framework. Our goal in this research is to design and implement a generalized multiagent market architecture that can provide explicit and integrated support for complex agent 1 The work was supported in part by NCERC Grant 217213/1999. Some work has been supported by CRIM as its participation in the European Consortium MIAMI (ACTS Project, Framework 4) interactions, such as contract-net [7], persuasive negotiation [8], as well as other types of negotiation protocols, including auction [9], open-bid or advertised-price buying and selling. Many requirements have been identified for a market architecture such as: • Providing support for a variety of transaction types including simple buying and selling, auctions and complex multiagent contract negotiation • Providing language in which the rich array of semantic content about commerce can be expressed. • Being extensible, by third parties, so providing multiagent contract and dynamic mediation. • Providing a secure and private credit and payment mechanisms • Controlling fraud and misrepresentation • Discouraging counterspeculation • Interoperating with other new and existing E-commerce service. In this paper we focus on the three first requirements, since they imply interaction and negotiation concepts.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1999 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 1999
Y1 - 1999
N2 - This paper focuses on the issues involved when multiple mobile agents interact in multiagent systems. The application is an intelligent agent market place, where buyer and seller agents cooperate and compete to process sales transactions for their owners. The market place manager acts as a facilitator by giving necessary information to agents and managing communication between agents, and also as a mediator by proposing solutions to agents or stopping them to get into infinite loops bargaining back and forth. The buyer and seller agents range from using hardcoded logic to rule-based inferencing in their negotiation strategies. However these agents must support some communication skills using KQML or FIPA-ACL. So in contrast with other approaches to multiagent negotiation, we introduce an explicit mediator (market place manager) into the negotiation, and we propose a mediation process based on dependence theory [1] implemented by the manager.
AB - This paper focuses on the issues involved when multiple mobile agents interact in multiagent systems. The application is an intelligent agent market place, where buyer and seller agents cooperate and compete to process sales transactions for their owners. The market place manager acts as a facilitator by giving necessary information to agents and managing communication between agents, and also as a mediator by proposing solutions to agents or stopping them to get into infinite loops bargaining back and forth. The buyer and seller agents range from using hardcoded logic to rule-based inferencing in their negotiation strategies. However these agents must support some communication skills using KQML or FIPA-ACL. So in contrast with other approaches to multiagent negotiation, we introduce an explicit mediator (market place manager) into the negotiation, and we propose a mediation process based on dependence theory [1] implemented by the manager.
KW - E-commerce
KW - Intelligent agents
KW - Mobile agents
KW - Negotiation
KW - Virtual market place
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0037556541&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ENABL.1999.805213
DO - 10.1109/ENABL.1999.805213
M3 - Published Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:0037556541
T3 - Proceedings of the Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, WETICE
SP - 279
EP - 286
BT - Proceedings - IEEE 8th International Workshops on Enabling Technologies
T2 - 8th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, WETICE 1999
Y2 - 16 June 1999 through 18 June 1999
ER -