Automated E-business Negotiation: Model, Life Cycle and System Architecture

How to apply negotiation principles to E-business is an important topic for both negotiation research and E-business research. Automation of E-business negotiation is even more challenging due to the inherent complexity of business negotiations. Some research has been done in this area, but a comprehensive model for automated E-business negotiation is still missing. Furthermore, existing work in this area does not consider the negotiation process from a full life cycle perspective; therefore valuable information from a previous negotiation is not properly used for the future negotiations. This report discusses two important issues related to automated E-business negotiation: model and life cycle. A system architecture based on the model and the life cycle is proposed. The negotiation model captures the key concepts and elements involved in automated negotiations. Since the negotiation model is an abstract of an automated negotiation system that implements the business negotiation process using computer networks, it is natural for the model to include different negotiation roles played by different people. Moreover, the model needs to formalize some human activities usually only kept in negotiators’ mind. Although our negotiation model includes six aspects of negotiation, this report focuses on two important aspects: the negotiation decision model and negotiation messages. The negotiation decision model captures concepts such as negotiation goals, policies, strategies, plans of decisions and actions, and their interrelationships. Negotiation messages define a comprehensive set of structured messages to be exchanged among two negotiation systems. The negotiation life cycle model divides the whole negotiation process into four phases: analysis, design, execution and post-negotiation analysis. The results from the upstream phases are used as inputs into 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 included. The life cycle model presented in this report covers life cycle models we have surveyed. A system architecture based on the negotiation model and the negotiation life cycle model is proposed and implemented.