A Model for a Federative Trader

The advances in the communication technology with high transmission rates, improved security and low error rates, the future (and present) needs of the users for integration of automation islands, cooperative work (CSCW) and architectures for open distributed services and the progress in the standardization (RM-ODP) made an environment for open distributed processing not only possible, but also indispensable to attend the new demands of the users (e.g., decision-making systems [1], distributed artificial intelligence (DAI), etc.). The open environment has the advantage of being unlimited and free to admit any kind of user, component or application. Therefore, this environment is characterized by heterogeneity and decentralization, but, at the same time, it must assure the autonomy of each component or local environment. In an Open Distributed System, it is highly desirable the existence of a means to make dynamic selection of computational services that satisfy certain properties. For this reason, the trader is a key component in such an environment. Its role is to manage the knowledge of the currently available services and to find service offers that match the clients’ requirements [2].