CSE 470 Project Home Page - Team 7
Course Page Project Documents Meeting Summaries Prototype Team Members: Edward Glowacki Project Manager Cheryl Carlson Project Facilitator Kristina Johnson Documentation Manager Paul Wiles Research Coordinator E-mail the whole group		Realtime Commercial Bidding System Blackbit Trading, Inc. Introduction Since Enron’s demise, there seems to be a role for brokering various kinds of commercial goods and commodities, or so our customer believes. Our group has been contacted to architect a distributed online brokering system for commercial products. Unlike EBay, this is not strictly a consumer oriented system, we allow reverse-auctions, and we expect the transactions to occur in approximate realtime. The set of auctions and reverse-auctions, an auction or reverse-auction itself, and the bidders, must be assumed to be running concurrently on separate platforms connected by some sort of network. Our customer has little expertise in E-systems and may not have asked for all that is needed. Similarly, she may be asking for features that are not a good idea. Your job includes analysis of this problem to give the customer a viable system. Background An Auction Site consists of a group of auctions and reverse-auctions. An auction is conducted by an auctioneer, which is to be automated. A user should be able to get a list of auctions and connect to a specific auction (or auctioneer). An auction follows the traditional definition: an auction is a client (seller) selling one item to a dynamic group of bidders mediated by an auctioneer. A reverse-auction is a client (buyer) buying something, usually a contract for delivery of goods, from a dynamic group of bidders mediated by an auctioneer. In an auction, the client sets the suggested initial price and the starting date and time, which is available from the auction site. In a reverse-auction, the client sets the highest price she will pay, and a date and time for for the reverse-auction. Each bidder must be known to the auction site globally, and must be active with the auctioneer. The initial authorization process is described below. Even though this will be a distributed process, we have been asked to include in our design the bidding client. Each bidder will maintain a list of bids for the current auction with which the bidder is associated. Bids are received by the auctioneer from bidders in realtime. When the current high (auction) or low (reverse-auction) bid price is bested, the auctioneer must notify all currently active bidders that this has occurred and what the current new best bid is. The identity of the maximum/minimum bidder is not broadcast. Auctions and reverse-auctions start at a specific time set by the client, and end when the bid has not been bettered for some parameterized length of time (we’ll start with 10 minutes, but this is subject to change), or when a specific preset time occurs. More information can be found on the project description at the course homepage.