Communication Bottleneck in Agent-mediated eMarketplace

摘要

Electronic marketplace is no more a test-bed for business. Recent advance in the agent technology and the global emerging of electronic marketplace communities have made D2B trading into a new era. Buyers and suppliers can simply key in the criteria and click a button, the agent will then automatically search, match and negotiate for them. However, this ease-to-use facility brings in a technical issue that we have to be aware ― the eating up of communication bandwidth and computing resource. While the number of requests is large, the performance of a marketplace server will surely be degraded. In return the effeciency and the profitability of an electronic marketplace wilt be diminished. Therefore, it is inevitable to set rules to constraint the agent generation rate as well as the jumping behavior of the agents amongst the electronic marketplaces. In and , we have derived certain results that can be used for agent population control in the routing and management problem. In this paper, the results are extended for the electronic marketplace design.