Abstract

Abstract We transfer the common notion of marketplaces as locations for trading to infrastructures for electronic commerce. Then, we argue that multi-agent systems are a promising technology to realise such electronic marketplaces because of the autonomous, task-oriented, and interactive capabilities of agents in dynamic and distributed environments. We present the agent toolkit JIAC IV and describe its special features that make it a suitable candidate for the realisation of electronic marketplaces. In more detail, we describe how interactions between agents are made more flexible and reliable by a service scheme, which covers generic aspects of interactions.