Features

• FM is completely written in Java.
• The customizability of FM allows for the specification, and subsequent activation, of a large variety of market scenarios: from simple toy scenarios to complex real-world scenarios, i.e., from extremely simple market scenarios in which the same auction is repeated over and over till market scenarios that make FM behave like the actual market. This capability of scenario generation allows the repeatability of the experiments (tournaments) to be conducted.
• FM is multi-user. It allows multiple users to spawn their agents in their own machines in order to make these to participate in remote tournaments.
• FM remains architecturally-neutral since no particular agent architecture (or language) is assumed or provided for building trading agents. Alternatively, a library of agent templates written in Java, C, and Lisp accompanies this release in order to assist agent programmers to build their agents. In this way, the programming effort narrows down to developing auction strategies. Importantly, these templates handle the connection of the trading agent to the FM interagents: autonomous software agents which intermediate the communication between the trading agents and the institution, the market,enforcing them to follow the rules of the game.
• A built-in agent builder facility allows for the automatic generation of agents with customizable auction strategies, so that families of agents capable of simulating different trading behaviours can be easily created.
• Auctions can be monitored step-by-step thanks to the FM Monitoring Agent. This keeps track of every single event taking place during a tournament in order to obtain a visual, global representation of the agents' flow from scene to scene within the market as well as the communication flow (what the agents utter and when).
• The FM database stores the information to be used by trading agents to carry out market analysis and auditing.
• FM has been designed to be as user-friendly as possible. Thus, the FM GUI allows the whole interaction between the users and FM to be done through graphical interfaces.