An agent-based Trading Infrastructure for Combinatorial Reverse Auctions

A Combinatorial Reverse Auction Trading Infrastructure - CRATI is designed and implemented as an agent-based system. Two basic building blocks Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) and an Open Source Java Constraint Programming Library (Choco Solver) are used to facilitate agent interactions and an optimization task. For our purpose, it is shown that auction Winner Determination Problem (WDP) can suitably be represented as a weighted set covering problem instance whose solution gives the decided winners of the auction process. In order to realize the system, a variation of Contract Net protocol is designed and implemented to handle auctions that occur in the platform from start to finish.