Automated e-business negotiation: Model, life cycle, and system architecture

Due to the inherent complexity of business negotiations, the automation of e-business negotiation presents a real challenge. Although there is a large body of literature on the topic of negotiation, most studies deal with human-to-human negotiations and a comprehensive model for automated e-business negotiation is still lacking. Furthermore, the existing work in this area does not consider the negotiation process from a full life cycle perspective; therefore valuable information generated by various stages of the life cycle is not fully utilized. Some recent works have attempted to build fully automated negotiation systems and negotiation support systems; however, none of them has demonstrated how decisions and actions taken by the implemented systems to control the automated negotiation process are related to negotiation goals, policies, and strategies.; This dissertation deals with three important issues related to automated e-business negotiations: negotiation model, negotiation life cycle, and system architecture. We formally define automated e-business negotiation as a 6-tuple, which contains clients, automated negotiators, negotiation messages, negotiation protocols, a requirement and constraint specification model, and a negotiation decision model. This dissertation focuses on the negotiation messages and the negotiation decision model. The other elements have been dealt with in a previous work that involves the implementation of an Internet-based negotiation server. Messages passed between replicated negotiation servers are defined in terms of business object documents in the XML format. They correspond to the primitive operations needed to implement the negotiation protocol. The negotiation decision model formally defines the relationship between a business enterprise's mini-world, negotiation contexts, negotiation goals, plans of decisions and actions, negotiation policies, negotiation strategies, and cost-benefit evaluation and selection.; The negotiation life cycle divides the entire negotiation process into four phases: analysis, design, execution, and post-negotiation analysis. The results from the upstream phases are used as inputs in the downstream phases. Since business negotiation is an iterative and continuous process, a feedback mechanism from the post-negotiation analysis phase to previous phases is also included. A system architecture based on the negotiation model and the negotiation life cycle model is proposed, and its implementation is described.