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Future generations of electronic commerce infrastructures will facilitate multiservice negotiations — negotiations between one customer and several providers regarding the provision of a personalised bundle of services. These negotiations allow the customer to obtain, for example, a complete travel package made up of several flights and hotel reservations, and matching the customer's specific requirements (regarding budget for example).The main issue in a multiservice negotiation is to handle the constraints that tie together the services within the bundle. Another is to design a scalable negotiation protocol, i.e. one that performs well regardless of the size of the bundle of services.A specific multiservice negotiation is proposed that has two distinctive properties. Firstly, its protocol is defined by a dynamic and decentralised constraint satisfaction algorithm. Secondly, the protocol is embedded within a set of mobile software agents, which perform the negotiation on behalf of the customer. The negotiation is tested on a travel agency application, and exhibits several valuable qualities. It is more scalable than traditional centralised facilitator-based solutions. It can also be customised easily (for optimisation purposes for example), without upgrading software on the providers' sides. Additionally, it is very suitable for mobile users, who are intermittently connected to the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enterprise of the future needs to be flexible, adaptive, and to respond rapidly to market demands and opportunities. This, in turn, demands a flexible, adaptive infrastructure. A plausible way to achieve such an infrastructure is to base its organisation on autonomous agents, where each agent responds locally to the intra- and extra-organisational forces it experiences. Enterprise adaptation then arises as an emergent effect. The theories of Holland, and related work on complex adaptive systems, have a direct bearing on the emergence of system adaptation from the interaction of locally adaptive entities. This paper ties Holland's theory of artificial and natural adaptive systems to autonomous agent systems. To illustrate the use of these theories in this context, the paper presents a system of evolving autonomous agents, interacting in a simulated producer/consumer economic world. The paper presents preliminary results with the producer/consumer, evolving agents system, and discusses the implications of these results for evolving, adaptive enterprise infrastructure systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A centralised approach to management of distributed systems works well when applied to relatively small-scale systems. As the scale grows, so do the problems of making appropriate system-wide decisions and co-ordinating their execution. As a result, large centrally managed systems tend to be ponderous and rigid. Devolving decision-making responsibility to local units means that locally appropriate responses to changed circumstances can be made rapidly. However, it is quite possible that local decisions in different elements of the system will interfere adversely.How does one co-ordinate local decisions in large systems without re-introducing central control and its associated problems? The decentralised approach adopted here is to craft the interactions between local decision-making elements (agents), in order that effective management of the overall system is an emergent result of repeated local decisions and interactions. The general solution to this problem is an ambitious long-term research goal. This paper presents some results that offer a way forward within a particular class of problem in which the interactions between agents can be modelled as sale and purchase of commodity items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Holland's Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems largely dealt with how systems, comprised of many self-interested entities, can and should adapt as a whole. This seminal book led to the last 25 years of work in genetic algorithms (GAs) and related forms of evolutionary computation (EC). In recent years, the expansion of the Internet, other telecommunications technologies, and other large scale networks have led to a world where large numbers of semi-autonomous software entities (i.e., agents) will be interacting in an open, universal system. This development cast the importance of Holland's legacy in a new light. This paper argues that Holland's fundamental arguments, and the years of developments that have followed, have a direct impact on systems of general network agents, regardless of whether they explicitly exploit EC. However, it also argues that the techniques and theories of EC cannot be directly transferred to the world of general agents (rather than EC-specific) without examination of effects that are embodied in general software agents. This paper introduces a framework for EC interchanges between general-purpose software agents. Preliminary results are shown that illustrate the EC effects of asynchronous actions of agents within this framework. Building on this framework, coevolutionary agents that interact in a simulated producer/consumer economy are introduced. Using these preliminary results as illustrations, areas for future investigation of embodied EC software agents are discussed.