Exception Handling Services in Open Multi-Agent Marketplaces

Electronic agent marketplaces are formed by collections of software agents that interact with one another in order to automatically negotiate and form partnerships or trade products and services through the Internet. Designing efficient and robust open electronic marketplaces, whose participants will be independently developed software agents, is a difficult problem, which requires the development of new architectures, which are capable of coping with unreliable computational and network infrastructures, limited trust among independently developed agents and the possibility of systemic failures. In analogy with human societies, agent marketplaces will benefit from the introduction of appropriate electronic exception handling institutions, whose role will be to help guarantee efficiency and fairness in the face of these challenges.  The goal of this project is to combine concepts from sociology and artificial intelligence in order to propose and experimentally evaluate concrete, reusable exception handling architectures for enabling robust, efficient and "fair" marketplaces of software agents.