Negotiation services for e-marketplaces

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With an ever-increasing emphasis on e-commerce and the importance of negotiation to market transactions, there is a present and growing need for effective systems to enable negotiation in online transactions. When properly designed, e-negotiation systems should lower the costs associated with negotiation in the e-marketplace, reduce resistance by market participants to computer-mediated negotiation, and foster the emergence of better agreements. Yet, despite the great promise of e-negotiation, the design of these systems has always lacked a systematic, traceable and reproducible approach. Consequently, most e-negotiation systems today implement a single negotiation protocol, which is usually hard-coded into the system. In order for e-negotiation systems to fulfill their promise, a structured approach is needed in conjunction with a configurable framework for their design, development, and deployment. A core requirement for this approach and framework must be a separation of the negotiation protocol from the system that implements it, thus requiring protocols to be formally specified via shared languages. Other critical requirements for the approach and framework include: configurability, standardized tools, generic components to enable customization and reuse, cost and process efficiency, and rapid and easy deployment and testing. The resulting systems should be web-based, easy to use and personalize, affordable, traceable, reliable, secure, scalable, efficient, and open to integration with other information systems. This research project seeks to develop such an approach and framework using a model-driven service oriented methodology, and to leverage web service orchestration techniques and languages for modeling negotiation processes.