A Meta-Framework for Agile Development of SOA Market Platforms

Abstract

Markets – and in particular auction markets – are usually known to be efficient mechanisms for information aggregation and for the allocation of goods and services. But a fundamental lesson learned from Economics is that market design matters. Even small changes in market rules may lead to significantly different outcomes. Thus a good design, implementation, and validation of a market mechanism poses a big challenge to market engineers, which cannot be mastered without appropriate engineering approach accompanied by appropriate supporting tools. In this paper we describe the tools available in the area of Market Engineering and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Also we propose a new approach towards building market mechanisms that offers market engineers a new degree of agility and freedom during the design and implementation phases. The new approach follows the principles of service-oriented architectures and agile model driven development. Furthermore, we present three different case studies where the new framework was successfully applied for the fast implementation of new electronic market platforms and we present results from a complexity analysis as well as from a preliminary technology acceptance survey among a small group of market engineers.

Keywords: Market Engineering, Market Repository, Markets, Auctions, Rapid Application Development