DIESECT: A distributed environment for simulating e-commerce contracts

We study the development of a distributed, agent-based, simulation environment where autonomous agents execute e-commerce contracts. We present a multi-agent architecture in which contracts are represented as a set of commitments that an agent must be capable of monitoring and reason with in order to be able to verify that the contract is not violated during interaction. We employ the JADE agent platform to build the multi-agent simulation infrastructure, and the Reactive Event Calculus to provide agent reasoning for monitoring and verification of contracts. We then experimentally evaluate the performance of our system by analysing the time and memory requirements as the number of agents increases, and by looking whether the behaviours of agents have any significant effect on the system’s overall performance.