Model Management in Electronic Markets for Decision Technologies: A Software Agent Approach

DecisionNet is a distributed Web based electronic mar ket for decision technologies such as data models so lution algorithms and modeling environments Con sumer provider interactions are facilitated by model management software agents provided by Decision Net To illustrate di erent approaches for design ing this agent functionality we present two agents that embody di erent designs for mediating consumer and provider interaction with the AMPL and GAMS modeling environments The AMPL agent is lean and places signi cant knowledge and reasoning requi rements on both providers when registering a tech nology and consumers when using technologies In contrast the GAMS agent encapsulates knowledge of the GAMS language and modeling environment to fa cilitate registration of models by providers and to cre ate a run time interface to models for consumers We discuss the relative advantages of both approaches and argue for the need to incorporate them into environ ments such as DecisionNet The authors acknowledge funding by the National Science Foundation grant IRI the U S Army Arti cial Intel ligence Center grantMIPR GNGS U S Army Research O ce grant DAAH G the Institute for Joint War fare Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the Na tional Research Center SFB of the Deutsche Forschungs gemeinschaft Introduction The explosive growth of the World Wide W eb cre ates new opportunities for the development and de ployment of decision technologies for and by organiza tions and individuals The DecisionNet project aims to improve the usability interoper ability and reusability of decision technologies by ex ploiting this growth of the Web DecisionNet is avail able on the World Wide Web at http dnet sm nps navy mil Fundamental to the DecisionNet concept is the idea that decision technologies be treated as objects services that can be used without having to be owned by consumers thus adding a use option to the make and buy options that potential consumers tradition ally have While DecisionNet presen tly is a non com mercial research prototype a logical conclusion of the DecisionNet idea is the establishment of an electronic marketplace for the dissemination and use of decision technologies To a user of decision technologies DecisionNet is a distributed collection of decision technologies each of which is accessible and executable over a global net work in this case the WorldWide Web The technolo gies in DecisionNet are owned and maintained by var ious technology providers on their own computational platforms and are listed in the collection through a registration process directed by software agents Tech 1060-3425/97 $10.00 (c) 1997 IEEE Proceedings of The Thirtieth Annual Hawwaii International Conference on System Sciences ISBN 0-8186-7862-3/97 $17.00 © 1997 IEEE nology execution is directed by other agents on the basis of metainformation obtained during technology registration execution occurs on the provider s ma chines and problem speci c input and output data is exchanged via HTML HyperText Markup Language forms e mail or the Internet s le transfer protocols These agent features and capabilities may be thought of as model management procedures in a distributed modeling setting In this paper we focus on the the analysis and design of these software agents The requirements for agent functionality may be understood by examining the following questions What is the c onsumer s level of knowledge about deci sion technologies The level of support that DecisionNet agents are programmed to provide to consumers is a function of the assumptions made about the knowledge that the consumer has about decision technologies What is the technology available to the consumer The technology available to the consumer deter mines the interface to the technologies available in De cisionNet What are the technical capabilities of decision technol ogy providers Since technologies are maintained by providers on their computational platforms the degree of support desired or required by these providers to create inter faces to their technologies determines agent function ality What role is to be played by DecisionNet Are these agents to be implemented by technology providers or are they to be implemented as an infrastructural ser vice by DecisionNet Agents provided by DecisionNet as an infrastruc tural service can reduce barriers to entry into De cisionNet for both consumers and providers They can also mediate transactions and provide a set of cen tralized services such as internet protocol assistance and billing However their development can consti tute signi cant e ort and providers with the capabil ity may choose to develop their own agents To provide substantive context we discuss the anal ysis and design of two software agents that facilitate interaction with optimization models and associated modeling environments AMPL and GAMS in DecisionNet These agents embody di erent de signs and are based on a di erent set of assumptions and answers to the questions listed above The rest of the paper is organized as follows We begin with two simple examples in x which we use illustratively throughout the paper Following that in x we provide an overview of the the DecisionNet architecture and discuss two key transactions the ad dition of decision technologies by providers and the execution of these technologies by consumers W e then discuss in x and x the design and analysis of two software agents the AMPL agent and the GA MS agent respectively In each case in addition to the technical issues we also discuss the implications their designs have for barriers to entry into Decision Net for consumers and providers W e conclude with thoughts on future research issues