A Web Services-enabled marketplace architecture for negotiation process management

As the eBusiness environment becomes more comprehensive and dynamic, negotiation processes among companies require more effective electronic support. Despite the progress in research on negotiation systems, the adoption of them has been slow in practice. In particular, the degree of automation achieved in other areas of the business process management has increased the importance of automating negotiation processes to achieve more efficient business s process management. Since most business negotiations are in the context of corporate procurement or sales processes, inter-company negotiations must be approached from the business process perspective. However, virtually all of the previous studies on negotiation systems have focused on the decision making variables and paid little attention to realistic process management aspects. In this paper, we discuss the support and automation of business-to-business (B2B) negotiations from a process management perspective. We propose a Web Services-enabled marketplace architecture and refine it by adding component-oriented process composition for easy generation and modification of negotiation processes.