This university project involved simulating supply chain negotiation using the (Recursive) Contract Net Protocol within a Multi Agent System - which had one Client, Suppliers and one Oracle. The first part involved implementing the Contract Net Protocol to allow the Client to get an order fulfilled by multiple suppliers. The best cost was chosen by the Client. The next scenario was to extend the first - in that if a supplier can't meet the need - it subcontracts the proposal to other suppliers.

The Multi Agent System was built using the FIPA-compliant JADE toolkit by Telecom Italia Labs. An ontology was defined with Protege and then imported into the standard package by a beangenerator plugin for Protege. The scenario B java classes might not work due to some niggly errors that still exist.

Owen Cliffe supplied the Oracle and skeleton agents and also mentored our group. He has some pages talking about this project.

• Writeup [PDF]
• Browseable codebase

Trading Agents | Dissertation