Building a multi-agent system for automatic negotiation in web service applications

Within the last decade, much effort has been put into the development of standards and technologies that enable the integration of Internet applications and the interoperability of Web services. The ultimate goal of these initiatives is to increase the automation of business processes. However many challenges remain to be addressed in order to reach a high-level of automation in Internet-based applications. Automatic negotiation is one of these challenges. In this paper we propose the Collaborative Agreement for Automatic Trading (CAAT), a Multi-Agent System framework that enables automatic negotiation in the context of a trading-based Web service.