Speeding up electronic commerce activities using CapBasED-AMS

CapBasED-AMS is a capability based and event driven activity management system that supports specification and execution of activities using the cooperative information systems paradigm. In CapBasED, an activity consists of interdependent tasks (atomic activities) that are executed by an agent. When there are many activity instances executing at the same time many tasks are queued up at agents for execution. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent system model, introduce a measurement of speed-up/slow-down, and develop different scheduling policies that allow for faster executions based on user's requests. Our scheduling framework is developed under the assumption that there are no additional resources for speeding-up the activities and it is based on re-scheduling activities in agent's queues.