Negotiating Inter-Organisational Processes

In this paper we develop a negotiation and contracting framework for inter-organisational workflows. The overall aim is to compute a group-plan from a given set of individual plans, where plans are formulated in the context of a given inter-organisational workflow between the agents. A general problem is that the individual plans are not consistent, i.e. the intersection of all individual plans does not contain a complete process, which leads from the initial state of the workflow to its final state. Therefore, negotiation is needed to obtain a compromise. In this paper we develop a generic negotiation protocol and use branching processes as the elementary data structure. The generic protocol is adapted within the specifics of our Sonar-framework. Sonar is a specification framework that defines the organisational structure of multi-agent systems. Sonar has a formal notion of teams and team-formation which is used here to instantiate the strategy parametres.