Advanced dynamic property evaluation for CORBA-based electronic markets

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 MarketPlace) set of development tools to create a number of dynamic virtual markets.