Privacy-based computation model in e-business

In the rapidly growing electronic business domain, organisations in the open environment are required to cooperate to achieve certain goals related to their business model. Given such an open environment, maintaining the privacy of organisations becomes a critical challenge. We believe the electronic marketplace (eMarketplace) is a promising architecture model for achieving cooperation between organisations. This is because of the nature of the market, where each entity selfishly attempts to achieve its own goals. The primary objective of this work is to model cooperation between different entities in the eMarketplace where the entities' privacy requirement is inherited. The proposed architecture, the eMarketplace, exists as a collection of software agents in cooperative distributed systems. It enables and supports scheduling services between market participants. These services take into consideration any privacy desires that may be required from various participants in an open, dynamic, and heterogeneous environment.