Managing e-Market Negotiation in Context with a Multiagent System

An experimental electronic market that supports various mechanisms for negotiation on a single issue—typically price—in electronic exchanges is supplemented here with the addition of a rich form of negotiation that operates in the context of the market data and information extracted from the Internet generally. An alternating offers negotiation mechanism supports multi-issue, time-constrained negotiation where the issue set is open. All transactions in this market, including offers, trades and requests for information, are managed as constrained business processes. A multiagent system based on a three-layer BDI hybrid architecture attempts to manage these processes within their constraints. The long-term goal of this work is to investigate the e-market evolutionary process.