An actor-based model for the electronic market

An international electronic market permits investors to achieve competitive advantage in a global market by improving the relationships between customers and suppliers. A fundamental prerequisite for the development of such a market is a supportive transaction infrastructure spanning several administrative domains. These considerations impose the importance of open, distributed environments as computational targets and their representation in terms of high-level models. This work proposes the “actor model” as a metaphor describing the key issues of electronic markets. This approach enables us to specify the organization of tasks and duties in a concurrent architecture thus freeing the designers from the low-level constraints of physical domains