The dynamics of the UMDL service market society

Abstract

One of our goals when building the University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL) has been to prototype an architecture that can continually reconfigure itself as users, contents, and services come and go. We have worked toward this goal by developing a multi-agent infrastructure with agents that buy and sell services from each other using our commerce and communication protocols. We refer to the services and protocols offered by this infrastructure as the Service Market Society (SMS). Within the SMS, agents are able to find, work with, and even try to outsmart each other, as each agent attempts to accomplish the tasks for which it was created. When we open the door to decentralized decision-making among self-interested agents, there is a risk that the system will degenerate into chaos. In this paper, we describe the protocols, services, and agent abilities embedded in the SMS infrastructure that combat such chaos while permitting flexibility, extensibility, and scalability of the system.