John E. Collins - Solving Combinatorial Auctions with Temporal Constraints in Economic Agents. John E. Collins.

John E. Collins ~ THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

"Solving Combinatorial Auctions with Temporal Constraints in Economic Agents

This dissertation is about Autonomous Agents in Electronic Commerce. We believe that much of the
commercial potential of the Internet will remain unrealized until a new generation of autonomous
systems is developed and deployed.

A major problem is that the global connectivity and rapid communication capabilities of the Internet can present an organization with vast numbers of new opportunities,to the point that users are overwhelmed,and conventional automation offers little help.

Much has been done to enable simple buying and selling over the Internet,including systems like
EBay,CommerceOne,and tools for enabling online business transactions from vendors like IBM,
Microsoft, ATG, Broadvision,and many others. Much is also being done to help customers and
suppliers find each other,from search engines like Google to vertical industry portals like Covisint to personalization systems and recommender engines like Net Perceptions. However,many business operations are much more complex than the simple buying and selling of individual items.

We are particularly interested in situations that require coordinated combinations of goods and services, where there is often some sort of constraint-satisfaction or combinatorial optimization problem that needs to be solved in order to assemble a “deal.” Commonly,these extra complications are related to constraints among task and services,and to time limitations. The combinatorics of such situations are not a major problem when an organization is working with small numbers of partners,but can easily become nearly insurmountable when “opened up” to the public Internet. " ~ John E. Collins Thesis

Source of John E. Collins information in John E. Collins Post
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~jcollins/jec-thesis.pdf