Distributed trading can be used to facilitate the exchange of both digital and non-digital goods between groups of users. Applications for trading include digital content exchange between groups of devices, such as digital media players. These devices, which have limited storage and processing capabilities, may also communicate via ad-hoc wireless networks. In order to adapt to increasing numbers of devices and the need for device mobility, agent based frameworks and distributed intelligent systems are needed, rather than traditional client/server architectures. These agent technologies must also be optimized to avoid overwhelming limited resources. The solution should be easily adaptable to a wide variety of environments, regardless whether the goods are digital. In this paper, we present a multi-agent framework that is scalable, efficient, and reusable, and exploits the inherent symmetries of trading.
Source: IS ’06 Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems