E-Commerce enabled new ways of transactions. Companies and individuals negotiate and make contracts every day. Practically, contracts are agreements between parties that must be kept. These agreements affect the involved parties irretrievably. Hence, negotiating them efficiently is proved vital. To this end we propose the use of intelligent agents, which benefit from Semantic Web technologies, ...

This paper describes a negotiation protocol proposed for inter-agent cooperation in a multi-agent system that we developed for optimisation and dynamic integrated scheduling within steel production. The negotiation protocol is a two-level bidding mechanism based on the Contract Net Protocol. The purpose of this protocol is to allow the agents to cooperate and coordinate their local schedules in...

With the advent of collaborative business processes that may include different parties, the interaction means between those processes steadily gains more importance. Despite this issue the modeling of message-based interactions is very complex and errorprone due to the inherent properties of asynchronous communication. In order to alleviate this problem several predefined interaction protocols ...

We analyze the welfare implication of regulating the price of last-mile access to consumers provided by local Internet service providers (ISPs). We consider a new two-sided market model that highlights the vertical relationship between two platforms, a local ISP and a large content provider called a Content Network Platform (CNP) that plays the role of platform in the content markets. The welfa...

When information services are organized to provide some composed functionality, their interactions can be formally represented as workflows. Traditionally, workflows are executed by centralized engines that invoke the necessary services and collect results. If services are clustered (e.g., based on geographic criteria), locally routing intermediary results between services in the same cluster c...

We continue our examination of absolute CR -epic spaces, or spaces with the property that any embedding induces an epimorphism, in the category of commutative rings, between their rings of continuous functions. We examine more closely the deleted plank construction, which generalizes the Dieudonné construction, and yields absolute CR -epic spaces which are not Lindelöf. For the Lindelöf case, a...

Location selection is an essential decision problem for many industrial domains such as hotel, tourism site, energy, school, warehouse, factory, stores, retails and estate. This paper proposes the Primitive Cognitive Network Process (P-CNP) for the location selection problem considering multiple criteria. An illustrated example of hospital site selection demonstrates the usability of the propos...

The work presented in this paper is part of an ongoing effort to study suitable task assignment mechanisms for decentralized MAS. Our focus is on systems that are characterized by tasks with delayed commencement. Such a task requires a preceding effort before the agent can start executing the task. An example is a robot that first has to move to the location of a task before it can start execut...

Brokerage and partners search is an important activity in the creation phase of a virtual enterprise (VE), where the most adequate consortium of enterprises should be selected to respond to a given business opportunity obtained by a broker. This paper proposes a multi-agent-based architecture to support this functionality in the context of a cluster of twelve enterprises in the moulds and die s...

This paper presents a new perspective of national power—sustainable national power (SNP)—emphasizing both the traditional comprehensive national power (CNP) and social and environmental sustainability. We propose a measurement to quantify the SNP based on the measurement of comprehensive national power and a sustainable adjusted index. In addition, density-equalizing maps are adopted to visuali...