Building Electronic Marketplaces with the ZEUS Agent Toolkit

Abstract

There is an emerging desire amongst agent researchers to move away from point solutions in favour of developing methodologies and tool-kits for building distributed multi-agent systems. This philosophy has led researchers at BT Labs to develop the ZEUS Agent Building Tool-kit, which facilitates the engineering of future agent applications through a library of agent-level components. The ZEUS tool-kit is currently being used to create a prototype distributed multi-agent electronic marketplace within our local area network. By employing the ZEUS agent class library this application has been implemented rapidly by two developers. ZEUS agents were not specifically designed for electronic commerce applications and so new functionality has been added that enables our agents to participate in auctions, and enables users to communicate information about transactions to their agents. Our experimental marketplace shares many features with existing agent-based auction systems, such as the dynamic..