Towards architecture-based self-healing systems
WOSS '02 Proceedings of the first workshop on Self-healing systems
Research challenges of autonomic computing
Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering
Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
An integrated trust and reputation model for open multi-agent systems
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason (Wiley Series in Agent Technology)
Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason (Wiley Series in Agent Technology)
Self Management and the Future of Software Design
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
A Relaxed-Ring for Self-Organising and Fault-Tolerant Peer-to-Peer Networks
SCCC '07 Proceedings of the XXVI International Conference of the Chilean Society of Computer Science
Designing institutional multi-agent systems
AOSE'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Agent-oriented software engineering VII
Scalable middleware environment for agent-based internet applications
PARA'04 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Applied Parallel Computing: state of the Art in Scientific Computing
Formalizing an electronic institution for the distribution of human tissues
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
Market intelligence and price adaptation
Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Electronic Commerce
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We describe the commercial application of agents to the handling of catalogue and stock-control for the selling of books on the internet. The primary characteristic of the target market is (very) low volumes over a (very) large number of items, thus agility and extremely low overheads are the essential factors for a viable business model. Being a new company (established 2004), without legacy software and with the freedom to make new choices, it was decided that the agent abstraction offered both short-term software engineering and longer-term business advantages. This expectation has been borne out in practice, in that it has been possible to construct an e-trading platform, using a 4-person team over a period of a few months, and that is now part of a live business operation handling just over 12,000 transactions daily. In this paper we explain how agents helped focus attention on the responsibilities of key software functions, how different functions should interact with one another and how to identify and propagate key performance indicator information through the system to detect unexpected behaviour. Agent technology has many potential benefits for dynamic fast-moving businesses where software requirements change quickly and business needs grow rapidly, all within a dynamic environment that has entirely different rules across the axes of geography, market, customer and competitor. Using autonomous agents allowed The Book Depository to build quickly a complex network of P2P relationships with a large number of suppliers and publishers of very different sizes who each utilize a variety of different trading and data interchange standards.