Toward an open virtual market place for mobile agents

The paper focuses on the issues involved when multiple mobile agents interact in multiagent systems. The application is an intelligent agent market place, where buyer and seller agents cooperate and compete to process sales transactions for their owners. The market place manager acts as a facilitator by giving necessary information to agents and managing communication between agents, and also as a mediator by proposing solutions to agents or stopping them to get into infinite loops bargaining back and forth. The buyer and seller agents range from using hardcoded logic to rule based inferencing in their negotiation strategies. However these agents must support some communication skills using KQML or FIPA-ACL. So in contrast with other approaches to multiagent negotiation, we introduce an explicit mediator (market place manager) into the negotiation, and we propose a mediation process based on dependence theory (C. Castelfranchi, 1994) implemented by the manager.