Trading System Simulation

Abstract

STL++ has primarily been designed for supporting the implementation of MASs comprising simulated embodied agents. However, the coordination language may also be used to implement other classes of MASs. For that reason, we show in this chapter how STL++ can be used for implementing a simulation of a trading system [SCK+99], [SCH99].

Indeed, the numerous activities that take place within a trading system are typically distributed and can be modeled by a MAS. Agent-based electronic commerce is therefore becoming one of the most important application domains for MASs [NRS+98], [NS98], [MGM99]. Concrete solutions encompass several agent-based frameworks like Kasbah [CM96] or FishMarket [RANSP97].

The research in coordination models and languages has also proposed some specific scenarios for implementing electronic commerce applications; see for instance a proposal based on the PageSpace platform [CKR+97] and another one using IWIM and Manifold [PA98b].

Our goal is not to achieve full automation of a trading system. This work rather concentrates on simulating the automation of such a system. Furthermore, our aim is neither to focus on the control algorithms of the different agents, nor on the negotiation techniques (see e.g. [GM98]) that are undertaken by the agents in order to process a transaction, but rather to concentrate on the basic coordination mechanisms (the objective coordination) that come into play in the interactions between agents, for which STL++ is precisely suitable. Thus, in this implementation, agents are endowed with a very basic autonomy in the sense that they can make decisions on their own, without the intervention of the user. More sophisticated autonomy-based control algorithms and smart negotiation techniques could be tackled in a further stage.

Figure 9.7, at the end of this chapter, gives a scaled down graphical overview of the organization of the agents that compose our trading system, as well as their interactions. To avoid cluttering the graph, port names (on which the matching is based) have been intentionally omitted. Figure 9.1 shows the class hierarchy of the implementation discussed in this chapter. We explain the different classes in the following sections.