Reliability Aspects of Multi-commodity Markets

In this paper several reliability aspects of multi-commodity trade are discussed. As it is very often required that trading decisions should be taken both rationally and very quickly, e.g on a short-term electric power market, in such cases trading is performed automatically by multi-agent systems. Thus the question of MAS reliability arises, which is herein considered in two aspects topological and functional. Interactions of agents in a MAS occur according to a certain topological pattern which can be directly transformed to the structural reliability model of that MAS. A number of such topological patterns are presented along with respective reliability models. In its functional aspect a MAS can be seen as a graph whose nodes process input information and pass it to other nodes thus fulfilling collectively certain task. An agent's malfunction can lead to a delay, misfulfillment or failure of that task. An interesting model of inter-agent functional dependence based on game-theoretical approach is presented. Apart from reliable execution of trading operations, an important issue is the ability to quickly assess whether the fulfillment of a contract is technically possible. An example is given where the effective conditions which energy suppliers' capabilities must meet are defined as the constraints of a transportation problem. Also, a non-trivial problem of quickly finding those constraints is addressed.