Multi-agent Interaction Technology for Peer-to-Peer Computing in Electronic Trading Environments

Open trading environments involve a type of peer-to-peer computing characterised by well-defined interaction protocols that are used by the traders and sometimes updated dynamically. New traders can arrive at any time and acquire the protocols that are current. Multi-agent system technology is appropriate for these circumstances, and in this paper we present an approach that can be used to support multiple trader agents on multiple computing platforms. The approach involves the use of FIPA-compliant trader agents which (a) incorporate micro-agents for specific local tasks and (b) use coloured Petri nets in order to keep track of the local context of agent conversations. In order to enhance efficiency and employ standard transport services, the trader agents interact with peers on other platforms by means of JXTA technology. We illustrate the working of our approach by examining the operation of an example multi-agent system in commodities trading scenario.