Optimized query delivery in distributed electronic markets

Whenever product data is supplied by multiple product providers in a distributed electronic market and customer queries are submitted to all providers of this electronic market, the query workload is one of the major bottlenecks. We present a technique which reduces query workload and communication costs in distributed electronic market places involving multiple providers. The key idea is to guide customer queries through a network of brokers which aggregate the result information of previous queries, such that a query is posted only to those providers which may eventually provide products matching the query. A performance evaluation of our approach includes product data from a large number of car dealers as providers. It shows that our approach outperforms the standard query broadcasting technique by a factor of up to 50 - depending on the set of customer queries considered. Therefore, we consider our approach to be an important improvement towards the reduction of the query workload within distributed electronic markets. © Springer-Verlag 2004.