CrossFlow is an ESPRIT/IST project for support of cross-organizational workflow management in dynamically established virtual enterprises. The business paradigm of CrossFlow is that of dynamic service outsourcing, in which one organization (service consumer) outsources part of its business process to another organization (service provider). Service consumer and provider find each other through electronic market places and specify their collaboration in an electronic contract. This contract is then used to dynamically configure an infrastructure that connects and controls the workflow management systems of both organizations to facilitate provision of the service. The infrastructure supports fine-grained monitoring and control to allow tight cooperation between the organizations. 1 The CrossFlow context Today, companies focus on their core business and outsource secondary activities to other organizations. Growing complexity of products requires co-makership relations between organizations. Value chains require a tight cooperation between companies participating in these chains. To enable the creation and operation of these virtual organizations, the information processing infrastructures of participating organizations need to be linked. Automated support for processes crossing organizational boundaries is

Software agents help people with time consuming activities. One increasingly popular application for software agents is electronic commerce, namely having agents buy and sell goods and services on behalf of users. We recently conducted a real-life experiment in creating an agent marketplace, using a slightly modified version of the Kasbah system [Chavez96]. Approximately 200 participants intensively interacted with the system over a one-day, six-hour period. This paper describes the setup of the experiment, the architecture of the electronic market and the behaviors of the agents. We discuss the rationale behind the design decisions and analyze the results obtained. We conclude with a discussion of current experiments involving thousands of users interacting with the agent marketplace over a long period of time, and speculate on the long-range impact of this technology upon society and the economy. 1. Introduction Software agents help people with time consuming activities [Maes95]. In...

This paper provides a definition of automated negotiation within electronic commerce. It outlines two barriers to automated negotiation, the ontology issue and the strategy problem. State of the art overviews are given of automated negotiation, specifically Negotiation Support Systems, intelligent agents, the auction mechanism, and online marketspaces. Both academic research and currently functional systems are covered, and several World Wide Web addresses are given for readers who wish to investigate further on their own. 1 1 While every attempt is made to provide current URL locations, the Web changes more quickly than print media can ever capture. Hence, some of the URLs may not be current or correct by the time this article appears. We will try to keep our Negotiation Project web site, http://haas.berkeley.edu/~citm/nego-proj.html, current with respect to these addresses. 2 1.

Agents are becoming one of the most important topics in distributed and autonomous decentralized systems (ADS), and there are increasing attempts to use agent technologies to develop software systems in electronic commerce. Such systems are complex and there is a pressing need for system modeling techniques to support reliable, maintainable and extensible design. G-Nets are a type of Petri net defined to support modeling of a system as a set of independent and loosely-coupled modules. In this paper, we first introduce an extension of G-Net, agent-based G-Net, as a generic model for agent design. Then new communication mechanisms are introduced to support asynchronous message passing among agents. To illustrate our formal modeling technique is effective for agent modeling in electronic commerce, a pricenegotiation protocol example between buyers and sellers is provided. Finally, by analyzing an ordinary Petri net reduced from our agent-based G-Net models, we conclude that our agent-based G-Net models are L3-live, concurrent and effective for agent communications. 1.

Abstract 1 The importance of personalized products and services is increasing in the dynamic customer-oriented business marketplace. Open environment of dynamic interoperable eBusiness processes is a key requirement for the emerging business models. Negotiation processes are at the core of dynamic eBusiness. While research on negotiation is not new, the vast majority of the studies to date have focused on auctions and bilateral negotiations. More complex negotiations are often required for dynamic formation of supply network and personalized fulfillment of the requests. In addition, it is very common that negotiation processes are “interleaved ” with other business processes. In this paper, we propose a framework for negotiation processes that provides a consistent model for supporting a comprehensive range of negotiations in dynamic eBusiness environment. The new framework leverages the scope of existing research on the negotiations and extends it to the level of complexity necessary for next generation eBusiness applications. The framework provides the foundation for constructing dynamic negotiation processes by enabling the required functionality in five components: 1) negotiation requirements, 2) negotiation structure, 3) negotiation process, 4) negotiation protocol, and 5) negotiation strategy.

under Grant No. 0118767. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

In this paper, we propose an intelligent clearinghouse, an electronic marketplace with computer-mediated negotiation that supported with both data and textual information about the dynamic markets. Most existing electronic market systems support relatively stable markets: traders are not allowed to revise their bids and offers once they are entered to the system. The intelligent clearinghouse addresses dynamic markets where buyers and sellers are willing to change their utilities as market evolves or when more information become available to them. Traders in dynamic markets may suffer significant losses if they fail to execute transactions promptly or cannot utilize all the available information. We developed a prototype Virtual Property Agency to study the usefulness of such approach. The system was developed with agent technologies, where information, particularly the text files, about the market will be automatically collected by searching engine from the selected web sites for users to design their negotiation strategies. This system also supports multi-criteria negotiation and allows the users to enter the ranking of attributes to create utility function. The system aims to improve the transparency and efficiency of the real estate market. It enables traders to compromise their original utilities to avoid transaction failures. This paper also describes the foundation of the intelligent clearinghouse system and its trading mechanism, which include a short discussion about its order matching method and negotiation support capabilities.

Prior research has shown that high levels of software reuse can be achieved through the use of objectoriented frameworks. An object-oriented framework captures the common aspects of a family of applications, and thus, allows the designers and implementers to reuse this experience at the design and code levels. Despite of being a powerful design solution, frameworks are not always easy to use. This paper describes a technique that uses domain specific languages (DSL) to describe the framework variation points and therefore syntactically assure the creation of valid framework instances. This approach allows framework users to develop applications without worrying about the framework implementation and remaining focused on the problem domain. In addition, the use of DSLs allow for better error handling, when compared to the standard approach of adapting frameworks by directly adding subclasses. The DSL programs are translated to the framework instantiation code using a transformational system. The approach is illustrated through two real-world frameworks.

The paper attempts to survey the existing research and development efforts involving the use of mobile agents and intelligent agents for advanced e-commerce solutions. In particular it aims at providing a representative view of the current research trends in developing intelligent and mobile agentmediated e-commerce including location-aware, mobile and networked comparison -shopping, auction bidding and contract negotiation. A number of selected agent systems are presented with short overviews and then discussed in the context of agent-mediated e-commerce including the scope and specific solutions they address, provided support for agents' migration and users' mobility, and deployment approaches. Finally, a summary of the considered systems is presented together with some concluding remarks including the current state and trends in developing mobile and intelligent agents in advanced agentmediated e-commerce.

At a first glance, the web may seem like a good infrastructure for electronic com- merce, but with a closer look, and with a view to future open agent-based market infrastructures, the insufficiencies become apparent. There are no standards for describing the interests of participants in the market, such as having products for sale, and no standards for interacting with other participants in the market, such as vendors, buyers, and brokers. These problems are not caused by the web. They exist already in ordinary "human-based" markets. But with such standards, the Internet-based marketplace could turn into a global marketspace [1] that would make possible any degree of automation of access to and matching of interests, and of interaction between participants. We are currently exploring what types of formats and protocols are needed for these marketplace interactions. In this position paper we will discuss the relation between our work and the web. In summary, we see no competition between an agent-based marketplace and the web. They have quite complementary roles.