An Agent Matching Architecture for Bilateral Contacts in Multi Agent Markets

Abstract

In this paper, an agent matching architecture for bilateral contracts of a multi agent market is proposed. The bilateral market contains a number of sellers and buyers who face opponents for negotiation and signing bilateral contracts. Each agent has a hierarchical representation of trading commodity attributes, where based on that it will create a tree structure of attributes. Using this structure, we apply a modified version of fuzzy similarity algorithm to compute similarity between each pair of buyer and seller agents' trees. Then, we use game theory and the concept of Stackelberg equilibrium to assess the matchmaking among the seller and buyer agents. Agents who lose contract or want to sign a new contract have a chance to restart the procedure. Through a case study for bilateral contracts in energy market, the applicability of our agent matching architecture is illustrated.