Service selection is an important issue for market-oriented Grid infrastructures. However, few results have been published
on the use and evaluation of market models in deployed prototypes, making it difficult to assess their capabilities. In this
paper we study the integration of an extended version of Zero Intelligence Plus (ZIP) agents in a middleware for economics-based
selection of Grid services. The advantages of these agents compared to alternatives is their fairly simple messaging protocol
and negotiation strategy. By deploying the middleware on several machines and running experiments we observed that services
are proportionally assigned to competing traders as should be in a fair market. Furthermore, varying the environmental conditions
we show that the agents are able to respond to the varying environmental constraints by adapting their market prices.
Keywords Automatic Resource Allocation - ZIP Agents - Decentralized Economic Models - Service Oriented Grids
This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain under Contract TIN2006-5614-C03-01, and
the European Union under Contract CATNETS EU IST-FP6-003769.