Designing robust, open electronic marketplaces of contract net agents
ICIS '99 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Information Systems
A Roadmap of Agent Research and Development
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Proceedings of the IFIP TC2/WG2.6 Ninth Working Conference on Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in E-Commerce Systems
An Experimental Evaluation of Domain-Independent Fault Handling Services in Open Multi-Agent Systems
ICMAS '00 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems (ICMAS-2000)
The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Controling Contract Net Protocol by Local Observation for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems
CIA '08 Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Cooperative Information Agents XII
SmartContractor: A Distributed Task Assignment System Based on the Simple Contract Net Protocol
PRIMA '09 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Principles of Practice in Multi-Agent Systems
PRIMA'10 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems
The Effects of Different Interaction Protocols in Agent-Based Simulation of Social Activities
International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems
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Contracts are a powerful co-ordination mechanism in distributed systems. The contract net protocol has been applied since about 1980. The CNP distributes tasks to different problem-solving nodes. TRACONET extended CNP with a bidding and awarding decision process based on marginal cost calculations. The CIA(Cooperative Information Agent) framework introduced the notion of obligations, which was broadened by CAS (Contractual Agent Societies) to support the fluid organisation of agent societies. Finally, the TPA framework (Trading Partner Agreement) introduced by IBM, although not agent-based, uses contracts as well, it uses executable contract in particular. We will analyse these four different contract model related researches (CNP, TRACONET, CAS and TPA) to compare their capabilities, background assumptions and limitations. We propose an integrated architecture and discuss the essential requirements still to be met.