Negotiation services for e-marketplaces

随着对电子商务的日益重视以及协商对市场交易的重要性，目前存在对能够在在线交易中进行协商的有效系统的日益增长的需求。 如果设计得当，电子谈判系统应能降低电子市场中谈判的相关成本，减少市场参与者对以计算机为中介的谈判的抵制，并促进达成更好的协议。然而，尽管电子谈判的巨大前景，这些系统的设计一直缺乏一个系统的，可追溯的和可复制的方法。因此，大多数电子谈判系统今天实现一个单一的谈判协议，这通常是硬编码到系统中。为了使电子谈判系统履行其承诺，需要一个结构化的方法，结合可配置的框架，其设计，开发和部署。这种方法和框架的核心要求必须是将协商协议与实现它的系统分离，因此需要通过共享语言正式指定协议。该方法和框架的其他关键要求包括：可配置性、标准化工具、通用组件，以实现定制和重用、成本和流程效率，以及快速简便的部署和测试。由此产生的系统应该是基于网络的，易于使用和个性化，负担得起的，可追踪的，可靠的，安全的，可扩展的，高效的，并开放与其他信息系统的集成。本研究计划旨在开发这样一个方法和框架，使用模型驱动的面向服务的方法，并利用Web服务编排技术和语言建模的谈判过程。

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.