IIIA

Because on-line auctions form an important area for agent-mediated electronic commerce, the Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce workshop has devoted eparate track to this topic. Building upon the success of the fishmarket tournaments, this year the Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce workshop is to host in Barcelona a fishmarket tournament organized by the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and iSOCO, Intelligent Software Components, S.A, and hosted by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). The reckless participants will be developing their trading agents endowed with intelligent auction strategies to compete to have the great honour of becoming the winner of the first international fishmarket tournament. For this purpose, they will make use of FM 100 the new version of FM, a test-bed for electronic auction markets developed at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (previous tournaments were hosted by FM 0.9 , the first, early version of FM).
 

Tournament definition. Specification of the trading scenario to be faced by contendants. A trading scenario will involve a collection of explicit parameters that characterize an artificial market. Such parameters define the bidding conditions (timing restrictions, increment/decrement steps, publicly available information, etc), the way goods are identified and brought into the market, the resources buyers may have available, and the conventions under which trading agentsare going to be evaluated.

Software release.The AMEC fishmarket tournament will be hosted with the aid of FM 100, the current version of the FM test-bed. FM 100 has been endowed with a library of agent templates intended to help agent programmers to construct their own agents. In this way participants can concentrate on their auction strategies. Furthermore, FM also provides a set of customizable dummy agents for training purposes. It is our intention also to maintain a public repository where participants can put their agents and make them available to the rest of participants to conduct mini-tournaments.

Participation Subscription.We would very much appreciate that researchers interested in participating let us know about their intentions in order to determine how many classfication tournaments must be organised. Those intended to participate please fill out this form.

First Round [04/30/2000].Before the actual tournament taking place in Barcelona, we plan to conduct two trials so that developers can be provided with some feedback about their agents' performance in actual scenarios.

Final Round [06/03/2000].

FM, the software to host the AMEC tournament, is the result of the Fishmarket project, a four-year project conducted at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute involving a large number of researchers and students. Do you want to know more about the Fishmarket project? Perhaps you would like to go through the Fishmarket project web page. There, you can visit an actual fish market, download the project's publications or find more information about its team members.

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