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The Evolution of the Contract Net Protocol

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Advances in Web-Age Information Management (WAIM 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2118))

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Abstract

Contracts are a powerful co-ordination mechanism in distributed systems. The contract net protocol has been applied since about 1980. The CNP distributes tasks to different problem-solving nodes. TRACONET extended CNP with a bidding and awarding decision process based on marginal cost calculations. The CIA(Cooperative Information Agent) framework introduced the notion of obligations, which was broadened by CAS (Contractual Agent Societies) to support the fluid organisation of agent societies. Finally, the TPA framework (Trading Partner Agreement) introduced by IBM, although not agent-based, uses contracts as well, it uses executable contract in particular. We will analyse these four different contract model related researches (CNP, TRACONET, CAS and TPA) to compare their capabilities, background assumptions and limitations. We propose an integrated architecture and discuss the essential requirements still to be met.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. INFOLAB, Tilburg University, P.O.Box 90153, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Lai Xu & Hans Weigand

Authors
  1. Lai Xu
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  2. Hans Weigand
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Software Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4444, USA

    X. Sean Wang

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110004, China

    Ge Yu

  3. Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Hongjun Lu

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Xu, L., Weigand, H. (2001). The Evolution of the Contract Net Protocol. In: Wang, X.S., Yu, G., Lu, H. (eds) Advances in Web-Age Information Management. WAIM 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2118. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47714-4_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47714-4_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42298-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47714-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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