Abstract
This paper presents a holonic co-ordination infrastructure for electronic procurement. The agent-based infrastructure consists of two components which are holonicly made up of a recursive hierarchy of three different agent types: a co-ordination server and a set of co-ordination assistant agents. The coordination server represents a platform through which buyers and sellers can interact, provides matchmaking services, and is equipped with coordination mechanisms such as auctions, negotiations and coalition formation mechanisms. The co-ordination assistant agents support their users, i.e. buyers and sellers, in their market interactions on the server. Particularly, they support their users in purchasing and selling of product bundles because adopting optimal bidding and pricing strategies while taking part in many auctions simultaneously is a task too complex for humans to solve optimally. The holonic structure of the coordination assistant agents and the co-ordination server helps to reduce complexity while allowing a high grade of adaptability and flexibility.
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Gerber, A., Russ, C. (2001). A Holonic Multi-agent Infrastructure for Electronic Procurement. In: Stroulia, E., Matwin, S. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2056. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45153-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45153-6_2
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