A human centered agent-based architecture for electronic brokerage

The steady increase in Internet access and the development of Electronic Commerce are giving rise to a number of trading networks on the global Internet. Electronic brokerage, envisioning brokers acting on customers' behalf to locate required products and services at the best available price, is a promising technique to solve a specific problem of electronic commerce business relations, i.e. the identification of the goods and services satisfying the user requirements to the highest possible degree. In this paper we describe a electronic brokerage system based on an Human Centered Virtual Machine (HCVM). HCVM layered architecture allows the broker to proceed seamlessly from the user's vision of the market, based on a nominal scale, to ordinal and interval based representations suitable for intelligent search agents. Moreover, it ensures applicability to a wide range of application domains.