An extensible framework for automatic negotiation in distributed online bargaining applications

Summary form only given. In some trading-based Web applications, it is desirable for the parties engaged in a business to negotiate via their own agent system. This requires their agent system to be interoperable through a distributed architecture. In this paper we present the collaborative agreement for automated trading (CAAT), an initiative intended to deal with this issue. The framework that is built on top of the FIPA agent architecture model combines the agent technology and the Web service functionalities to provide a distributed computing architecture for supporting online bargaining. It has three main components: the business interaction model, the ontology, and the interaction protocol. The framework is intended to be an open standard that is made available to all organizations or software developers willing to build interoperable trading-based agent systems.