An Agent-Mediated Marketplace for Transportation Transactions

This paper reports on the development of an innovative agent-mediated electronic marketplace, which is able to efficiently handle transportation transactions of various types. Software agents of the proposed system represent and act for any user involved in a transportation scenario, while they cooperate and get the related information in real-time mode. Our overall approach aims at the development of a flexible framework that achieves efficient communication among all parties involved, constructs the possible alternative solutions and performs the required decision-making. The system is able to handle the complexity that is inherent in such environments, which is mainly due to the frequent need of finding a modular” transportation solution, that is one that fragments the itinerary requested to a set of sub-routes that may involve different transportation means (trains, trucks, ships, airplanes, etc.). The system’s agents cooperate upon well-specified business models, thus being able to manage all the necessary freighting and fleet scheduling processes in wide-area transportation networks.