Distributed multi-agent reputation framework for interactions in e-market

Software agents are dynamic, autonomous, reactive, pro-active, possibly persistent and sociable software entities that are designed to achieve their desired goals by enabling personalized solution for complex systems. Agent mediated systems provide the necessary decision making support to facilitate the automation of processes, especially in dynamic environments like e-market. This paper proposes and simulates framework of a distributed multi-agent e-market environment comprising of self-interested buyers and sellers where buyers and sellers communicate through asynchronous message passing. The proposed architecture is situated in a single cycle, sealed bid reverse auction scenario, where self-interested buyers and sellers compute reputation of participants dynamically by utilizing both web and agent technologies. It enables a participating agent to compute the trustworthiness of other agents dynamically based on its past experience and other changing parameters of e-market.