Agents, services, and electronic markets: how do they integrate?

Agent-oriented programming (AOP) is a client/server paradigm that gains increasing attention. Recently emerging AOP platforms claim to provide suitable technical support for the implementation of electronic market (EM) systems. This paper first argues that an open system infrastructure to support the 'right' programming paradigm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for dynamic proliferation of EMs. Another important requirement is organizational openess of client/server cooperations. The COSM (Common Open Service Market) infrastructure aims at generic system support for such applications. It was designed and implemented to realize flexible means for accessing remote services dynamically in evolving electronic markets. The paper then shows how the COSM infrastructure can be extended by AOP concepts in order to provide an adequate open systems platform to support highly flexible service offer and access.