=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-404/paper-9
|storemode=property
|title=A Multi-Agent System for Content Trading in Electronic Telecom Markets Using Multi-Attribute Auctions
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-404/Paper8.pdf
|volume=Vol-404
}}
==A Multi-Agent System for Content Trading in Electronic Telecom Markets Using Multi-Attribute Auctions==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-404/Paper8.pdf
A Multi-Agent System for Content Trading in Electronic
Telecom Markets Using Multi-Attribute Auctions
Ana Petric
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and
Computing, University of Zagreb
Unska 3, Zagreb, Croatia
ana.petric@fer.hr
ABSTRACT Generation Network (NGN) provide connections which enable a
The advent of the Internet and the development of the New particular lifestyle that is aspiring to digital humanism where
Generation Network (NGN) has enabled, while investments in people’s daily activities are becoming more digitalized,
licenses and the desire to stay competitive in the future has convenient and intelligent [27]. Actors on the telecom markets are
triggered the development of value added services (VAS). Due to pursuing innovations and launching new value-added services
high market penetration, the telecommunication industry has been (VAS) [5] in order to increase revenue. This is due to the fact that
facing income stagnation. Consequently, it has been shifting focus provisioning basic telecommunication services (i.e., fixed and
to VAS in order to increase income. When forming VAS, special mobile communication, data transfer) is no longer enough to keep
attention needs to be paid to the purchase of resources (e.g., existing customers, let alone attract new ones, due to high market
transport capacity and information resources) needed for the penetration. Investment regain of licenses and staying competitive
service creation. The fact that information resources (i.e., content) in the future are key drivers for the expansion of new VAS on the
are not commodities, opens the question of what is the best (i.e., market. This new market demand and technological development
efficient) mechanism that should be used for trading. As the has led to the convergence of different domains (i.e.,
number of participants on the B2B telecom market increases, the telecommunications, information technology (IT), the Internet,
need for the automation of transactions carried between them is broadcasting and media) all involved in the telecom service
critical. The automation of transactions should lower operational provisioning process. The ability to transfer information
costs and speed up the service provisioning process. In this paper, embodied in different media into digital form to be deployed
we try to identify stakeholders on the telecom e-market, establish across multiple technologies is considered to be the most
their roles and relationships and find an appropriate model which fundamental enabler of convergence [14]. An important feature of
captures their transactions. Finally we consider the use of multi- convergence is the composition of services and content derived by
attribute auctions for content trading in telecom markets. combining multiple simpler services or types of content in order
to provide more powerful services.
Categories and Subject Descriptors The research problem addressed in this paper concerns the
I.2.11 [Distributed Artificial Intelligence]: Intelligent agents, automation of business processes related to the creation of VAS
Multiagent systems. J.4. [Social and Behavioral Sciences]: that are traded on the telecommunication electronic markets (e-
Economics. I.6.5 [Model Development]: Modeling markets). There are two types of resources needed for the creation
methodologies of telecom VAS. They are the information resources (i.e., content)
the service is based on and the transport capacities needed for
service provisioning. The telecom market is divided into two
General Terms submarkets, the B2B (Business-to-Business) market and the B2C
Management, Design, Economics. (Business-to-Consumer) market. Our research is focused on B2B
telecom e-market trading with information resources using multi-
Keywords attribute auctions.
Multi-attribute auctions, Multimedia Content Trading, B2B e- The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes
markets, Intelligent Software agents, New Generation Network the participants on the telecom e-market. Section 3 describes the
phases we need to go through in order to conduct a transaction on
1. INTRODUCTION the B2B telecom e-market. Section 4 addresses general auction
The advent of the Internet and the development of the New mechanisms and presents multi-attribute auctions. Section 5 states
the main questions of this research effort and proposes some
answers.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that 2. TELECOM E-MARKETS
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy The appearance of new stakeholders on the B2B telecom market
otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, had to be taken into account so new business models were
requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. formed. One of the long-term objectives of the NGN is to support
10th Int. Conf. on Electronic Commerce (ICEC) ’08 Innsbruck, Austria business models that open the market to emerging service
Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-075-3/08/08 ...$5.00. providers [14]. The volume and dynamic nature of VAS offered
in the NGN place novel demands and challenges on telecom 3. B2B TELECOM E-MARKET
stakeholders. In this newly developed situation it is not enough The BBT (Business-to-Business Transaction) model [15]
just to adequately respond on the existing requests but also to systematically analyses processes in B2B e-markets. The
intelligently anticipate the development of the future events and proliferation of auctions on the Internet, and the dynamic nature
adapt to their environment. In order to understand the of auction interactions, argues for the development of intelligent
relationships between stakeholders and the way they interact it is trading agents which act on behalf of human traders (i.e., buyers
important that their roles are well classified. We use the and sellers). Intelligent trading agents can also be used to
classification determined in [8] as shown in Figure 1. impersonate stakeholders in the environment of the NGN in order
Consumers are service users that have at their disposal various to enable automated interactions and business transactions on the
devices (e.g., mobile phone, laptop, PDA) and are connected telecom markets [20]. Namely, an agent can monitor and
through various access networks (e.g., 3G, WiMax). Access participate in the market continuously. Software agents [7, 19] are
Provider ensures telecommunication access for service programs which autonomously act on behalf of their principal
consumers. Service Provider facilitates a variety of basic and while carrying out complex information and communication tasks
integrated services for consumers enabling easy content that have been delegated to them. A software agent is intelligent
consumption. Carriers provide a transport service for the data (its intelligence is grounded on its knowledge base, reasoning
traffic and they usually buy bandwidth from Network mechanisms and learning capabilities), autonomous, reactive,
Infrastructure Owners who provide transmission lines. A large proactive, cooperative, and persistent. Additionally, a software
number of Carriers are at the same time also Network agent can also be mobile.
Infrastructure Owners. Wholesaler of Capacity provides lower- From the BBT model perspective [15], we can formally identify
cost transmission and storage capacity. Content Owner possesses six fundamental steps which must be executed in order to
the information in its original format while Content Enabler successfully complete one transaction in a B2B environment.
converts this information to a format eligible for the transmission These steps are as follows (Figure 2): 1) partnership formation, 2)
over heterogeneous networks. Content Provider is at the same brokering, 3) negotiation, 4) contract formation, 5) contract
time Content Owner and Content Enabler. Wholesaler of Content fulfillment, and 6) service and evaluation. B2B negotiation is
provides lower-cost content. Server Infrastructure Owner complex since it typically involves larger volumes, repeated
provides storage capacity and server functionality. Information transactions and more complicated contracts. This is the reason
Enablers enable information resources while Transport Enablers why most researchers have concentrated on the negotiating phase
provide transport of information resources through the various of B2B market transactions.
networks swiftly and seamlessly.
The partnership formation phase usually includes forming of a
We are focusing on the B2B e-market since it is widely believed new virtual enterprise or finding partners to form a supply chain.
that it will become the primer way of doing business [21]. The A virtual enterprise represents a form of cooperation of
assumption is that the telecom B2B e-market will grow with other independent stakeholders which combine their competencies in
B2B e-markets. A special intention is paid to the negotiation order to provide a service [6]. On the B2B telecom e-market,
phase since the outcome (i.e. financial efficiency) is still the Content Owners, Content Enablers, Server Infrastructure Owners
premier performance measure for most businesses [16, 17]. and Wholesalers of Content can form a virtual enterprise in order
to successfully place and sell information resources to various
service providers. Moreover, Carriers, Network Infrastructure
USE Owners and Wholesalers of Capacity may also form a Virtual
n n Enterprise to enhance trading with transport capacity. With the
n expansion of the e-market, the number of buyers and sellers
FACILITATE grows accordingly making it more difficult to find all potential
n
business partners trading a requested service/resource. The main
role of the Brokering phase is to match service providers with
information/transport enablers that sell information
resources/transport capacities needed for the creation of a new
n n service or improvements of an old one.
STORE &
ENABLE
TRANSPORT Negotiation is a process which tries to reach an agreement
n n
regarding one or more resource attributes (e.g., price, quality,
etc.). Each stakeholder in the negotiation process is represented
by an intelligent trading agent that negotiates in his behalf (e.g.,
Information Agent trades in behalf of Information Enabler). The
Content Owner n Carrier n trading agent uses a negotiation strategy suitable for the type of
Content Enabler n Network Infrastrucutre auction applied (i.e., negotiation protocol) on the market. The
Owner
n
negotiation protocol defines the rules of encounter between
Server Infrastructure n
Owner Wholesaler of Capacity n trading agents. It should ensure that the negotiation’s likely
Wholesaler of Content n
outcome satisfies certain social objectives, such as maximizing
allocation efficiency (i.e., ensuring that resources are awarded to
the participants who value them the most) and achieving market
Figure 1. The roles and relationships of stakeholders in the
telecom market
Virtual enterprise – Information enabler
are sold in auctions has grown to tremendous proportions.
Content Owner Auctions are defined as a market institution that acts in pursuit of
a set of predefined rules in order to compute the desired economic
Content Enabler
outcome (i.e., high allocation efficiency) of social interactions
Server Infrastructure
Owner [26]. Based on bids and asks placed by market participants,
Wholesaler of
Content
resource allocation and prices are determined. There are two main
PARTNERSHIP
FORMATION
Virtual enterprise – Transport enabler
directions to take when designing auctions, namely we distinguish
Carrier
efficient and optimal auctions. The objective in efficient auctions
BROKERING
Network
is to maximize allocative efficiency and deal with dividing the
Procurament auctions
(Multi‐attribute Auction)
Infrastructure Owner surplus in an auction among the auctioneer and bidders, while
Wholesaler of
NEGOTIATION
Capacity optimal auctions concentrate on maximizing revenue or the
Double‐sided auctions
(Continuous Double expected utility of the bid taker [3].
Auction ‐ CDA) BBT model
CONTRACT
FORMATION
4.1 Multi-attribute auctions
Item characteristics (i.e., attributes) represent an important factor
CONTRACT in deciding which auction should be used in the negotiation phase.
FULFILLMENT
Negotiation on commodities, such as transport capacities, focuses
SERVICE AND
mainly on the price of the item. These items are mostly sold in
EVALUATION
conventional single-attribute auctions. On the other hand,
complex items such as information resources often require
negotiation of several attributes, and not just the price [6]. They
are sold in multi-attribute auctions [3] which are a special case of
Figure 2. The BBT model for the B2B telecom domain procurement auctions. Procurement auctions are also called
reverse auctions since there are multiple sellers (e.g., information
equilibrium [9]. The negotiation strategy represents a set of rules enablers) and only one buyer (e.g., service provider) that
that determines the behavior of a trading agent. purchases items (e.g., information resources). Multi-attribute
auctions have been attracting more and more attention in B2B
The negotiation process can be either distributive or integrative markets since the price is not the only important attribute
[22]. In distributive negotiations, one issue is subject to considered in the decision making process1.
negotiation while the parties involved have opposing interests.
One party tries to minimize loss and the other party tries to The first step in a multi-attribute auction is for the buyer to
maximize gain. Distributive negotiations are also characterized as specify his preferences regarding the item he wishes to purchase.
“win-lose” negotiations. The continuous double auction (CDA), Preferences are usually defined in the form of a scoring function
which is suitable for transport capacity trading in a B2B e-market, based on the buyer’s utility function [2]. In order to familiarize
represents a distributive type of negotiation in a multi-unit auction sellers with buyer’s valuations of relevant attributes, the buyer
with multiple buyers and sellers [25]. usually publicly announces his scoring function. Sellers are not
obligated to disclose their private values of an item. The winner
In integrative negotiations, multiple issues are negotiated while of the multi-attribute auction is the seller that provided the highest
the parties involved have different preferences towards these overall utility for the buyer. The buyer sends a request to all
issues. For example, two information enablers may want to sell interested sellers which than reply by sending bids. The buyer
multimedia information resources to a portal provider, but one is selects the bid with the highest overall utility. If the auction is
primarily interested in the sale of news, whereas the other is one-shot, this bid is declared the winning one, otherwise it is
interested in the sale of movie clips. These variant valuations can declared as the currently leading bid and the new round of the
be exploited to find an agreement resulting in mutual gain. If their auction begins. The buyer can also define the bid increment or
preferences are the same across multiple issues, the negotiation minimum requirements the bid has to fulfill in order to compete in
remains integrative until opposing interests are identified. In such the next round. Figure 3 shows a multi-attribute auction between a
a case, both parties can realize gains: consequently, another name service provider and several information enablers. Information
for this class of negotiations is “win-win” negotiations. A multi- enablers offer multimedia content composed of video and audio
attribute auction represents an integrative negotiation process streams with different performances. Based on its utility function,
which can be used for trading with information resources. the service provider reaches an agreement with the information
Last three phases include termination of negotiation where enabler whose information resource has the highest overall utility.
negotiated terms are put in a legally binding contract (contract
formation), carrying out the transaction agreed in the contract
4.2 Content trading
(contract fulfilment) and traders evaluating the received service The term content encompasses movies, songs, news, images and
(service evaluation). Due to legal issues and subjective judgments text, in other words data and information within various fields
it is not likely that these phases are going to be automated with [14, 23]. The NGN brings its own new added value into the
the use of intelligent agents. market and one of these added values is multimedia content
composed of several types of content (e.g., audio, video, data…)
4. AUCTIONS 1
Auctions, due to their well defined protocols, are suitable enablers http://www.cindywaxer.com/viewArticle.aspx?artID=149
of negotiations in e-markets. The variety and value of goods that (Business 2.0 magazine)
INFORMATION
ENABLER
e-market, forming value added services from purchased goods
(SELLER #1)
and then selling those services to consumers on the B2C telecom
e-market.
Due to the lack of research related to B2B telecom e-markets [13]
Business
(i.e., most research is related to the B2C telecom e-market [5, 10,
12, 18]) and the expected growth of B2B e-markets in general, the
second phase is oriented to finding an appropriate model which
INFORMATION AGENT captures all stages related to transactions carried out on the B2B
(SELLER ROLE)
telecom e-market. As shown in Section 3, the BBT model was
used to describe B2B telecom transactions, while intelligent
INFORMATION
SERVICE
PROVIDER
ENABLER
(SELLER #2)
agents were used to impersonate stakeholders on the market.
(BUYER) Since the B2B e-market includes repeated transactions with
existing and/or new business partners, a new phase should be
introduced into the BBT model. This phase will be in charge of
collecting knowledge regarding the state of the e-market,
Business
Business processing information collected in the service evaluation phase,
and deciding on the changes that need to be applied in the next
INFORMATION AGENT round of negotiations.
PROVIDER AGENT (SELLER ROLE)
(BUYER ROLE)
The third phase is dedicated to the negotiation phase of the BBT
telecom model. Well defined and widely researched CDA is used
INFORMATION
for trading with transport capacities. Consequently, we decided to
ENABLER
(SELLER #5) focus on multi-attribute auctions for trading with information
resources (i.e., content). In order to trade with content, the first
step is to define relevant attributes and form an ontology which
adequately represents multimedia content. The next step is to
Business study existing models of multi-attribute auctions using different
approaches (i.e., defining utility functions [2, 3], fuzzy multi-
attribute decision making algorithms [24], introducing pricing
INFORMATION AGENT functions and preference relations for determining acceptable
(SELLER ROLE)
offers [1], defining reserved and aspiration levels of attributes
and distinguishing negotiable and non-negotiable attributes [4]).
Figure 3. An agent mediated e-market for content trading After studying the existing models, we plan to choose the best
[11]. When trading with multimedia content there are several features from each approach and try to incorporate them into a
attributes that are negotiated on; the quality of the audio and new unified model most suitable for content trading. The new
video content (i.e., audio bit rate, resolution of the video), type of approach will be incorporated into to the multi-attribute auction
the information provided (i.e., music, video clips, games, news, mechanism based on the English auction. Due to the specifics of
sports, weather…), time of origin of the content (e.g., two days the B2B telecom e-market (e.g., larger values of single
old weather forecast is of no use, one minute old stock market transactions, repeated transactions, and a smaller number of
news could be worth a lot), reusability of the content (i.e., using participants than on B2C e-markets) the goal is to create a balance
the content in forming various services), potential number of users between maximizing the allocative efficiency of the B2B market
interested in this content, and the price. An example of trading and maximizing revenue or the expected utility of bid takers
with multimedia content by using multi-attribute auctions is characteristic for multi-attribute auctions.
shown in Figure 3 where several agents posing as sellers offer The fourth phase will be devoted to implementing the multi-
different multimedia (i.e., audio and video) content while the attribute auction with agents as representatives of telecom
agent posing as a buyer must decide which content holds the stakeholders using the JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment
highest utility for him and then buy the content in order to resell it Framework) agent platform and evaluating the designed
further on the B2C e-market [18]. mechanism with the existing mechanisms mentioned in the
previous paragraph.
5. PROPOSAL OF THE RESEARCH PLAN
The research plan consists of four stages2. The aim of the first
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
phase is to explore the telecom market, identify participants on The work presented in this paper was carried out within research
the market, establish their roles and relationships, and, finally projects 036-0362027-1639 "Content Delivery and Mobility of
establish with what goods and services are being traded on the Users and Services in New Generation Networks", supported by
market. This phase is completed and is described in Section 2. We the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of
can se that a service provider actually manages a supply chain by Croatia, and "Agent-based Service & Telecom Operations
buying information and transport capacities on the B2B telecom Management", supported by Ericsson Nikola Tesla, Croatia.
2
I am a 3rd year PhD student.
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