1 Agents advanced features for negotiation in Electronic Commerce and Virtual Organisations formation process Eugénio Oliveira, Ana Paula Rocha LIACC, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto Abstract Electronic Commerce technology has changed the way traditional business is being done. Transactions’ complexity is increased due both to the huge amount of available information and also to the environment dynamics. Moreover, Electronic Commerce has enabled the arising of new economical structures, as it is the case of Virtual Organisations. Our research aims at providing flexible and general-purpose systems for intelligent negotiation, both for Electronic Commerce and Virtual Organisation formation. This paper proposes an Electronic Market architecture implemented through a Multi-Agent system. This architecture includes both a specific market agent which plays the role of market coordinator, as well as agents representing the individual business partners with their own goals and strategies. We also include a sophisticated negotiation protocol through multi-criteria and distributed constraint formalisms. An online, continuous reinforcement learning algorithm has been designed to enable agents to adapt themselves according to the changing environment, including the competitor agents. 1 INTRODUCTION Electronic Commerce was often identified, in the recent past, with the capabilities of making available and/or searching for product information in electronic format through inter and intra nets. Last years research efforts gave birth to new computer frameworks and platforms making it possible for electronic agents, acting as individual or business organisations delegates, to automatically negotiate through the internet. However, most of the current available systems still are inflexible under several perspectives: language, strategic behaviour, adaptability, specific purpose. Electronic commerce techniques have to be seen as enabling technologies for more advanced inter-organisational relationships leading to the effective creation of virtual organisations. A Virtual Organisation (VO) is an aggregation of autonomous and independent organisations connected through a network (possibly a public network like WWW) and brought together to deliver a product or service in response to a customer need. Virtual Organisation management should be supported by efficient information and communication technology. This aggregation of organisations is advantageous in the sense that it will reduce complexity – today’s products and services are increasingly complex and requires close coordination across many different disciplines – and most important, will enable the response to rapidly changing requirements. The Virtual Organisation will only exist for a temporary time limit, that is the time needed to satisfy its purpose. The VO life cycle is decomposed in four phases (Faisst, 1997) (Fischer, 1996), namely: • Identification of Needs: Description of the product or service to be delivered by the VO, which guides the conceptual design of the VO. • Partners Selection: Rational selection of the individual organisations (partners) which will compose the VO, based in its specific knowledge, skills, resources, costs and availability. • Operation: Control and monitoring of the partners’ processes, including resolution of conflicts, and possible VO reconfiguration due to partial failures. • Dissolution: Breaking up the VO, distribution of the obtained profits and storage of relevant information. Our work is currently focused on the second above mentioned phase (partners selection), and our proposal concerns the development of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture to model the Electronic Market that supports the automatization of the VO. In the process of virtual organisation formation, goals representing the future virtual organisation purpose have to be described along several issues and made available to all those single organisations (enterprises) that are connected to the market. In order to compete, trying to bring their own specific competencies to the future consortium, agents representing organisations are endowed with several different possible behaviour tactics and higher level strategies for