A web services based artificial market

We describe a web services based computational tool for studying large commodity markets. The software architecture is based on three important guiding principles: (i) efficiency and scalability, (ii) extensibility to incorporate several different clearing mechanisms and commodities, (iii) modularity for platform independent operations and use. The computational model has several distinguishing features. They include: (i) the ability to generate individualistic, demographics based, time-varying demand profiles, (ii) a highly configurable system that supports different market clearing mechanisms, strategies and matching algorithms for buyers and sellers (Atkins, Marathe, and Barrett 2007), (iii) ability to aggregate individuals into different hierarchy of classes and (iv) ability to physically clear flow based commodities. From the software standpoint, the architecture has several unique features, including use of web services for loosely coupling individual elements of the system, an easy to use web based graphical user interface for specifying input parameters as well as viewing the results, and a work flow language for modeling various markets and market mechanism (Atkins et al. 2004). The system provides users the unique ability to experiment with a variety of markets such as market for communication spectrum, Internet bandwidth, electricity, as well as traditional commodities like corn, cotton etc.