AN AGENT-MEDIATED MARKETPLACE FOR TRANSPORTATION TRANSACTIONS Nikos Karacapilidis, Alexis Lazanas Industrial Management Lab, MEAD, University of Patras, 26504 Rio Patras, Greece Email: {nikos, alexlas}@mech.upatras.gr Pavlos Moraïtis Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, 75 Kallipoleos str., Nicosia, Cyprus Email: moraitis@ucy.ac.cy Abstract. This paper reports on the development of an innovative agent-mediated electronic marketplace, which is able to efficiently handle transportation transactions of various types. Software agents of the proposed system represent and act for any user involved in a transportation scenario, while they cooperate and get the related information in real-time mode. Our overall approach aims at the development of a flexible framework that achieves efficient communication among all parties involved, constructs the possible alternative solutions and performs the required decision-making. The system is able to handle the complexity that is inherent in such environments, which is mainly due to the frequent need of finding a modular” transportation solution, that is one that fragments the itinerary requested to a set of sub-routes that may involve different transportation means (trains, trucks, ships, airplanes, etc.). The system’s agents cooperate upon well-specified business models, thus being able to manage all the necessary freighting and fleet scheduling processes in wide-area transportation networks. Keywords. Software Agents, E-Marketplace, Transportation Management. 1. INTRODUCTION In the last few years, multi-agent systems have successfully addressed a variety of business problems, such as business process management (Jennings et al., 2000), supply chain management (Fox et al., 2000), and manufacturing scheduling (Shen and Norrie, 1998). The above success is partially due to the nature of software agents, which autonomously perform well-defined activities, based on rules and procedures coded into their behaviour. It is widely argued that such systems become more powerful and may solve complex problems when groups of different kinds of agents begin communicating in an efficient and effective way (Sycara and Zeng, 1996). This paper reports on the exploitation of software agent technology in transportation management. More specifically, it discusses analysis and design issues raised during the development of an innovative agent-mediated electronic marketplace (Bakos, 1998; Karacapilidis and Moraitis, 2001b), which is able to efficiently handle transportation transactions of various types. Agents of the proposed system represent and act for any user involved in a transportation scenario, such as customers who look for efficient ways to ship their products and transport companies that may - fully or partially - carry out such requests, while they cooperate and get the related information in real-time mode. Our overall framework is based on flexible models that achieve efficient communication among all parties involved, coordinate the overall process, construct possible alternative solutions and perform the required decision-making. In addition, the proposed system is able to handle the complexity that is inherent in such environments, which is mainly due to the frequent need of finding a “modular transportation solution”. To further explain this concept, consider the case where a customer wants to convey some goods from place A to place B, while there is no transport company acting directly between these two places. Supposing that two available carriers X and Y have some scheduled itineraries from A to C and from C to B, respectively, it is obvious that a possible solution to the above customer’s request is to involve both X