Title: Orchestrating interrelated trading activities

Authors: Yain-Whar Si, David Edmond, Arthur H.M. Ter Hofstede, Marlon Dumas

Addresses: Centre for Information Technology Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane Queensland 4001, Australia. ' Centre for Information Technology Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane Queensland 4001, Australia. ' Centre for Information Technology Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane Queensland 4001, Australia. ' Centre for Information Technology Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane Queensland 4001, Australia

Abstract: With the growing number of marketplaces and trading partners in the e-commerce environment, software tools designed to act on behalf of human traders are increasingly being used to automate trading activities. This paper describes a model for constructing trading engines which are capable of concurrently participating in multiple interrelated negotiations with heterogeneous protocols. The behaviour of these trading engines is specified by means of a generic synchronisation construct which enables the incremental composition of complex trading schemes, including a number of well known strategies from the financial trading domain. The construct is augmented with a priority-based scheduling algorithm which selects a set of nodes for negotiation based on their estimated profit, the time remaining and the desired degree of concurrency. The model also supports iterative negotiation, which is essential in any complex trading environment.

Keywords: composite trading activities; negotiation protocols; concurrent negotiations; synchronisation; e-commerce; electronic commerce; trading engines; priority-based scheduling; iterative negotiation; business process integration; multiple negotiations; interrelated negotiations; electronic marketplaces; trading strategies; coordination.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2005.006961

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2005 Vol.1 No.1, pp.12 - 25

Published online: 28 Apr 2005 *

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