Specification and Execution of Composite Trading Activities

Abstract

With the growing number of trading opportunities available online, software tools designed to act on behalf of human traders are increasingly being used to automate trading activities. The next logical step in this evolution is the automation of composite trading activities designed to fulfill complex user goals and requirements. In this paper, we describe a model for specifying composite trading activities involving concurrent and interrelated negotiations with multiple parties and heterogeneous protocols. The model supports the specification of several types of constraints, such as the number of required successful negotiations, the limit price for the items to be traded, and the temporal constraints imposed by all trading parties. In order to guide the execution of the trading activities, we describe a novel planning and execution model for composite trading activities which is designed to maximize the expected utility of the user.