Frank Griffel

Electronic contracting with COSMOS-how to establish, negotiate and execute electronic contracts on the Internet

Today, the Internet gains more and more attraction even for small companies to contact business partners and to automate cooperation between each other. However, the smaller the company the higher the relative setup costs that are required if the complete process of a commercial transaction is to be supported. We propose COSMOS as an Internet-based electronic contracting service that facilitates commercial partners with offer catalogues, a brokerage service, contract negotiation and signing as well as contract execution. The COSMOS architecture supports these functions in an integrated, unified way. The design and execution of contracts integrates patterns from the CORBA Joint Business Object Facility.

A Plug-in Architecture Providing Dynamic Negotiation Capabilities for Mobile Agents

The diversity of research and development work on agent technology has led to a strong distinction between mobile and intelligent agents. This paper presents an architecture aiming at providing a step towards the integration of these two aspects, concretely by providing an approach of dynamically embedding negotiation capabilities into mobile agents. In particular, the requirements for enabling automated negotiations including negotiation protocols and strategies, a plug-in component architecture for realizing such requirements on mobile agents, and the design of negotiation support building blocks as components of this architecture are presented.

SUPPORTING ELECTRONIC COMMERCE TRANSACTIONS WITH CONTRACTING SERVICES

Based on the specific characteristics and requirements for an adequate electronic commerce system support, this article gives an overview of the respective distributed systems technologies which are available for open and heterogeneous electronic commerce applications. Abstracting from basic communication mechanisms such as (transactionally secure) remote procedure calls and remote database access mechanisms, this includes service trading and brokerage functions as well as security aspects including such as notary and non-repudiation functions. Further important elements of a system infrastructure for electronic commerce applications are: Common middleware infrastructures, componentware techniques, distributed and mobile agent technologies etc. As electronic transactions enter the phase of performance, increasingly new and important functions are required. Among these are: Negotiation protocols to support both the settlement and fulfillment of electronic contracts as well as ad-hoc workflow management support for compound and distributed services in electronic commerce applications. In addition to an overview of the state of the art of the respective technology, the article briefly presents some related projects conducted by the authors jointly with international partners in order to realize some of the important new functions of a system infrastructure for open distributed electronic commerce applications.

Electronic contract negotiation as an application niche for mobile agents

We propose electronic contract negotiation-a sub-part of the more general area of electronic commerce-as an example application for mobile agents. We start by presenting a set of requirements that an application should fulfil in order to take advantage of mobile agents and show that not all distributed applications meet these requirements. We then present contract negotiation, an example of an application that can potentially take full advantage of mobile agents. The paper also contains an introduction to a mobile agent system being developed at Hamburg University and show how it can be used to implement contract negotiation.

DynamiCS: An Actor-Based Framework for Negotiating Mobile Agents

In this article, a framework to integrate negotiation capabilities—particularly, components implementing a negotiation strategy—into mobile agents is described. This approach is conceptually based on the notion of an actor system which decomposes an application component into autonomously executing subcomponents cooperating with each other. Technically, the framework is based on a plug-in mechanism enabling a dynamic composition of negotiating agents. Additionally, this contribution describes how interaction-oriented rule mechanisms can be deployed to control the behavior of strategy actors.

Java-Based Mobile Agents - How to Migrate, Persist, and Interact on Electronic Service Markets

This paper presents a mobile agent approach that aims at satisfying the following requirements of open Internet-based electronic service markets: the mobile agent system should be usable by any Internet user without a need for specifically configurated non-standard software tools. It should reduce costs in mobile computing environments and therefore enhance overall efficiency. It should suit well to an electronic service market where local services are commercially offered and business transactions predominate the interaction between customers and suppliers.

Electronic Contracting im Internet1

Heute bietet das Internet nicht nur fur Groβunternehmen sondern auch fur kleine Unternehmen Moglichkeiten zur automatisierten Kooperation. Im Bereich des Bu- siness-to-Business-Commerce wurden jedoch bisher kleine Unternehmen aufgrund relativ hoher Transaktionskosten eher davon abgehalten, Handelstransaktionen uber das Internet durchzufuhren. Fur solche Anwendungsbereiche wird in diesem Beitrag das COSMOS-Projekt (Common Open Service Market fOr SMEs) und seine Architektur vorgestellt, mit deren Hilfe die Vermittlung von Transaktionspartnern, der Aushandlungsprozeβ eines Vertrages sowie das Unterzeichnen und schlieβlich die Abwicklung der vertraglich vereinbarten Leistungen durch eine verteilte Kollaborationsanwendung unterstutzt wird. Dabei basiert die COSMOS-Architektur auf einem einheitlichen Vertragsmodell und unterstutzt diese Prozesse in integrierter Form. Architektureil erfolgt der Systementwurf in Anlehnung an den CORBA Business Object Component Architecture (BOCA).

Generative Softwarekonstruktion auf Basis typisierter Komponenten

Die komponentenbasierte Entwicklungssicht erhalt zunehmend Aufmerksamkeit, insbesondere auf Grund der von ihr in Aussicht gestellten vielversprechenden Vorteile wie besserer Produktivitat, Test- und Wartbarkeit, Wiederverwendung und Qualitat. Andererseits fehlt immer noch ein solides Fundament, auf dem sich solche Erwartungen grunden konnen. Zumindest bildet jedoch ein kompositorisches Vorgehen zweifellos den Kern kompentenbasierter Entwicklung. Dieser Beitrag stellt daher einen als Generative Softwarekonstruktion bezeichneten Entwicklungsprozess vor, der auf Basis eines interaktionsorientierten Typmodells eine hochgradig automatisierte Komposition verteilter Anwendungssysteme erlaubt. Das semantisch reiche Typmodell wird dabei als Erweiterung des aktuellen CORBA Component Model vorgestellt, unterstutzt eine typkorrekte und bei Bedarf automatisch adaptierende Komposition und wird anhand seiner Anwendung in der Finananzdienstleistungsdomane illustriert.

Interaction-oriented rule management for mobile agent applications

The characteristic features of delegation and interaction make the mobile agent programming paradigm on the one hand attractive for a wide range of distributed applications — in particular those related to E-Commerce — but on the other hand also pose a considerable semantical risk potential. In this paper, we present a generic approach of imposing rules on the behavior of mobile agents aiming primarily at reducing this kind of risk without impairing the agents’ basic decision logic and interaction ability. On the contrary, strong emphasis will be put on the algorithms, design and implementation of rules used to support the interaction between agents.

Dynamische Generierung von Protokollen zur Steuerung automatisierter Verhandlungen

In elektronischen Handelssystemen (E-Commerce) bekommt die Unterstutzung der Verhandlungsphase von Geschaftstransaktionen eine wachsende Bedeutung. Jedoch sind die meisten existierenden Systeme mit einem bestimmten Protokoll fest verbunden und daher eingeschrankt in ihrer Offenheit bzgl. der jeweiligen Anforderungen an eine Verhandlung. Um dem entgegenzuwirken, wird in diesem Beitrag eine Petrinetz-basierte Sprache zur Spezifikation von Verhandlungsprotokollen vorgestellt, welche dynamisch fur jeweils eine einzelne Verhandlung generiert und aktiviert werden konnen. Solche Protokolle und das entsprechende Verhandlungssystem sind daruber hinaus dafur konzipiert, vollstandig automatisierte Verhandlungsprozese mittels Anbindung von Softwareagenten zu steuern.