This paper focuses on market-like coordination mechanisms in multi-agent systems, with applications to business planning. Several fundamental criteria are derived in order to evaluate market-like coordination mechanisms. The central criterion is the efficient allocation of jobs to agents. Assuming a relationship between classes of operational planning problems and certain coordination mechanisms, business planning problems are classified on the basis of their relevant attributes. Coordination mechanisms for each of the classes are then introduced on the basis of auction theory and investigated with respect to the trade-off between efficiency and computational tractability. All of the mechanisms prove to have a common basis: the Vickrey Auction.

Abstract Requirements of emerging applications together with rapid changes in networking technology towards gigabit speeds require new adequate transport systems. Integrated designs of transport services, protocol architecture and implementation platforms are required by forthcoming applications in high‐speed network environments. The transport subsystem PATROCLOS (parallel transport subsystem for cel/ based high‐speed networks) is designed with special emphasis on a high degree of inherent parallelism to allow efficient implementations on multiprocessor architectures combined with specialized hardware for very time critical functions. The paper presents the new parallel protocol architecture of PATROCLOS, an appropriate implementation architecture based on transputer networks, and performance evaluation results, which indicate high throughput values.

Requirements of emerging applications together with rapid changes in networking technology towards gigabit speeds require new adequate transport systems. Integrated designs of transport services, protocol architecture, and implementation platforms are needed for the requirements of forthcoming applications in high-speed network environments. The transport subsystem PATROCLOS (Parallel Transport subsystem for cell based high speed networks) is designed with special emphasis on a high degree of inherent parallelism to allow efficient implementations on multiprocessor architectures combined with specialised hardware for very time critical functions. The paper presents transport system design guidelines based on experiences gained with parallel implementations of transport and network layer protocols on transputer networks, an implementation architecture for PATROCLOS based on transputer networks and results of a performance evaluation, which indicate promising throughput values.>