Multi-Agent Cooperative Transactions for E-Commerce

E-Commerce is a distributed computing environment with dynamic relationships among a large number of autonomous service requesters, brokers and providers. With the increasing automation of e-commerce applications, we will see the use of software agents that cooperate to perform business transactions. Multi-agent cooperative transactions are different in their requirements both from conventional atomic transactions executed under centralized control and from nested transactions executed under hierarchical control. Cooperative transactions require peer-to-peer protocols based on inter-agent communication. In this paper, we develop a cooperative mulitagent transaction model that includes peer-to-peer protocols for commit control and failure recovery. The significance and feasibility of this approach have been demonstrated in a prototype implemented at HP Labs, using our dynamic agent infrastructure.