MIAMAP: a virtual market-place for intelligent agents

The aim of the work is to verify the hypothesis which states that, "the use of dependency relations in the negotiation process will improve the balance between the need of the individual agents and the needs of the overall system". The application is an open virtual market place (L. Esmahi et al., 1999), where agents process their marketing transactions. We therefore present a generalized mediation model that provides support for a variety of transactions types, from simple buying and selling to complex multiagent contract negotiations. We also present a negotiation strategy (L. Esmahi et al., 1999), that takes advantage of the services of the market to construct beneficial contracts. Our market architecture is organized around three basic components: the market place and its manager, the customers (buyers/sellers), and the transaction sessions. We have shown in the experimental results, that the introduction of an explicit mediator can help resolve conflicts and add value to multiagent contracting, by allowing different types of contracts based on dependencies (L. Esmahi; J.C. Bernard et al., 1998).