Advanced dynamic property evaluation for CORBA-based electronic markets

Abstract

Match-making in virtual markets and trading in distributed systems are similar activities aiming at evaluating a client constraint against a set of available service offers, described in terms of properties. Virtual market systems, however, need elaborate schemes for keeping certain property values dynamically updated. Dynamic property updates can be supported by using the dynamic property concept of the CORBA Trading Service. Specifying, executing and managing the algorithms used to compute the values of the dynamic properties, however, is outside the scope of the related CORBA standard. This paper presents the concept and the implementation of a generic engine which can be used to create, edit, manage and execute dynamic-property evaluation-algorithms. This approach brings about a number of benefits: an improved development environment, a simulation test-bed, improved management and maintenance capability, and a structured way of linking the trading service to legacy systems. The resulting system has been used extensively as part of the ViMP virtual market place set of development tools to create a number of dynamic virtual markets.

Towards Optimized Data Fetching for Service Discovery

“…The problem of insufficient static descriptions for finegrained discovery requests within dynamic domains has been addressed using CORBA's Trading Service in the eMarketplace domain [15] where dynamic properties of a offered functionality exposed as a CORBA object can be calculated within a business's private space and where results can be integrated into the Trading Service discovery process. Trading Service consists of name-value property pairs which can be either static or dynamic.…”