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Notification

Once a new market has been created, initially only the Auction Manager and creating agent know about it. For other agents to be aware of the new auction, either they will have to periodically check for new auctions or rely on a notification service to alert them, depending on their individual needs. The Auction Manager serves as a focal point for our notification services since it both creates markets and accepts the original service requests from agents.

Whenever an agent requests a market, it can ask the Auction Manager to notify it if any new matching markets are created. In order to determine if an agent would be interested in a newly created auction, the Auction Manager compares its service label to the service label of the newly created auction using the market matching described in Section 3.1. If the agent's service can be exchanged there, then the Auction Manager sends a notify message to the agent telling it the new auction-id.



Tracy Mullen
7/20/1998